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Good (Very long) read.
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| Shakka |
Another email I got. Apparently from the National Review. It's quite long, but it's a good read if you have time. Sorry if the formatting is weird in places.:)
| quote: | This piece, written by Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S.
attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel
Rahman, is the most important commentary I have ever read on the threat
we face from militant Islam. I urge you to read this in its entirety.
This should be required reading for every American, to be read again and
again. I urge you to forward it to as many people as you know.
Steven Emerson
National Review Online
May 13, 2004
The War that Dare Not Speak Its Name
The battle is against militant Islam, not "Terror"
By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/mccar...00405130837.asp
EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is adapted from a speech given last month
at the annual conference of the University of Virginia School of
Medicine's Critical Incident Analysis Group
<http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/ciag/> (CIAG). The theme
of this year's CIAG conference was "Countering Suicide Terrorism: Risks,
Responsibilities and Realities."
At any gathering of analysts, academics, and law-enforcement officers
who specialize in counter-terrorism, it certainly is appropriate that we
should focus on risks, responsibilities, and realities. My question,
though, is whether we have the order backwards. Our most urgent
imperative today is the need to confront reality. Only by doing that can
we get a true understanding of the risks we face and our
responsibilities in dealing with them.
What reality am I talking about?
Well, we are now well into the third year of what is called the "War on
Terror." That is the language we all use, and it is ubiquitous. The
tabloids and the more prestigious journals of news and opinion fill
their pages with it. The 24-hour cable television stations are not
content merely to repeat "War on Terror" as if it were a mantra; they
actually use it as a floating logo in their dizzying set designs.
Most significant of all, the "War on Terror" is our government's top
rhetorical catch-phrase. It is the way we define for the American people
and the world - especially the Islamic world - what we are doing, and
what we are about. It is the way we explain the nature of the menace
that we are striving to defeat.
But is it accurate? Does it make sense? More importantly, does it serve
our purposes? Does it make victory more identifiable, and hence more
attainable? I humbly suggest that it fails on all these scores. This,
furthermore, is no mere matter of rhetoric or semantics. It is all about
substance, and it goes to the very core of our struggle.
Terrorism is not an enemy. It is a method. It is the most sinister,
brutal, inhumane method of our age. But it is nonetheless just that: a
method. You cannot, and you do not, make war on a method. War is made on
an identified - and identifiable - enemy.
In the here and now, that enemy is militant Islam - a very particular
practice and interpretation of a very particular set of religious,
political and social principles.
Now that is a very disturbing, very discomfiting thing to say in
21st-century America. It is very judgmental. It sounds very insensitive.
It is the very definition of politically incorrect. Saying it aloud will
not get you invited to chat with Oprah. But it is a fact. And it is
important both to say it and to understand it.
We have a rich and worthy tradition of religious tolerance in America.
Indeed, in many ways our reverence for religious practice and tolerance
is why there is an America. America was a deeply religious place long
before it was ever a constitutional democracy. That tradition of
tolerance causes us, admirably, to bend over backwards before we pass
judgment on the religious beliefs and religious practices of others. It
is an enormous part of what makes America great.
It led our government, within hours of the 9/11 attacks, to announce to
the world that Islam was not and is not our enemy. Repeatedly, the
president himself has said it: "The 19 suicide terrorists hijacked a
great religion." The message from all our top officials has been
abundantly clear: "That's that; Islam off the table; no need to go
deeper."
But we have taken the ostrich routine way too far. A commitment in favor
of toleration is not the same as a commitment against examination. We
have been so paralyzed by the fear of being portrayed as an enemy of
Islam - as an enemy of a creed practiced by perhaps a billion people
worldwide - that we've lost our voice on a very salient question: What
will be the Islam of the 21st century? Will it be the Islam of the
militants, or the Islam of the moderates? That's the reality we need to
grapple with.
Let's make no mistake about this: We have a crucial national-security
interest in the outcome of that struggle. We need the moderates to win.
And here, when I speak of moderates, I am not talking about those who
merely pay lip service to moderation. I am not talking about those who
take advantage of America's benign traditions and our reluctance to
examine the religious practices of others. I am not talking about those
who use that blind eye we turn as an opportunity to be apologists,
enablers, and supporters of terrorists.
I am talking about authentic moderates: millions of Muslims who want an
enlightened, tolerant, and engaged Islam for today's world. Those people
need our help in the worst way. They are losing the battles for their
communities. The militants may not be a majority, but they are a vocal,
aggressive minority - and they are not nearly as much of a small fringe
as we'd like to believe.
As an assistant U.S. attorney, time and time again I heard it over the
last decade, from ordinary Muslims we reached out to for help - people
we wanted to hire as Arabic translators, or who were potential
witnesses, or who were simply in a position to provide helpful
information. People who were as far from being terrorists as you could
possibly be. "I'd like to help the government," they would say, "but I
can't." And it was not so much about their safety - although there was,
no doubt, some of that going on. It was about ostracism.
Repeatedly they'd tell us that the militant factions dominated their
communities. These elements were usually not the most numerous, but they
were the most vocal, the best networked, the best funded, and the most
intimidating. Consequently, people whose patriotic instinct was to be
helpful could not overcome the fear that they and their families could
be blackballed if it became known that they had helped the United States
prosecute Muslim terrorists. The militants had the kind of suasion that
could turn whole communities into captive audiences.
This is no small matter. Events of the last decade, throughout the
world, are a powerful lesson that the more insular and dominated
communities become, the more they are likely to breed the attitudes and
pathologies that lead to terrorist plots and suicide bombings. It's true
that suicide bombers seem to defy precise psychological profiling; they
come from diverse economic and educational backgrounds - the only common
thread seems to be devotion to militant Islam. But while we have not had
success predicting who is likely to become a suicide bomber, it is far
easier to get a read on where suicide bombers and other terrorists will
come from. They come from communities where the militants dominate and
those who don't accept their beliefs are cowed into submission.
SAVING OURSELVES, SAVING ISLAM
That militant Islam is our enemy is a fact. That it is the object of our
war is a fact. That we need to empower real moderates is a fact. And we
need to talk about these facts.
We are not helping the authentic moderates if we avoid having the
conversation that so needs to be had if the militants hiding in the
weeds we've created are going to be exposed and marginalized. If we fail
to be critical, if we fail to provoke that discussion, it will continue
to be militants who hold positions of influence and who control
indoctrination in communities, madrassas, prisons, and other settings
where the young, the vulnerable, and the alienated are searching for
direction.
For ourselves too, and for the success of our struggle, we need to be
clear that the enemy here is militant Islam. If we are to appreciate the
risks to our way of life, and our responsibilities in dealing with them,
we need to understand that we are fighting a religious, political and
social belief system - not a method of attack, but a comprehensive
ideology that calls for a comprehensive response.
In the 1990s, our response, far from being comprehensive, was
one-dimensional. We used the criminal justice system. As an individual,
I am very proud to have been associated with the good work done in that
effort. Yet, if we are going to be honest with ourselves - if we are
truly going to confront reality - as a nation, we'd have to call it
largely a failure.
We have learned over the years that the militant population is large -
maybe tens of thousands, maybe more. Certainly enough to staff an
extensive international network and field numerous cells and small
battalions that, in the aggregate, form a challenging military force.
Nevertheless, in about a half dozen major prosecutions between 1993 and
2001, we managed to neutralize less than three-dozen terrorists - the
1993 World Trade Center bombers; those who plotted an even more ghastly
"Day of Terror" that would have destroyed several New York City
landmarks; the Manila Air conspirators who tried to blow U.S. airliners
out of the sky over the Pacific; those who succeeded in obliterating our
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and the would-be bombers of Los Angeles
International Airport who were thwarted just before the Millennium
celebration.
In these cases, we saw the criminal-justice response at its most
aggressive, operating at a very high rate of success. Every single
defendant who was charged and tried was convicted. As a practical
matter, however, even with that rate of efficiency, we were able to
neutralize only a tiny portion of the terrorist population.
Now, however, combining law enforcement with the more muscular use of
military force - the way we have fought the battle since September 11 -
we are far more effective. Terrorists are being rolled up in much
greater numbers. They are being captured and killed. Instead of dozens
being neutralized, the numbers are now in the hundreds and thousands.
But I respectfully suggest that this is still not enough, because it
doesn't necessarily mean we are winning.
WAR OF IDEAS
When I was a prosecutor in the 1980s, it was the "War on Drugs" that was
all the rage. We would do mega-cases, make mega-arrests, and seize
mega-loads of cocaine and heroin. It made for terrific headlines. It
looked great on television. But we weren't winning. Neighborhoods were
still rife with narcotics traffickers and all their attendant depravity.
And there was the tell-tale sign: The price of drugs kept going down
instead of up. We said we were at war, but with all we were doing we
were still failing to choke off the supply chain.
Now I see another version of the same syndrome, and if we don't talk
about Islam we will remain blind to it - to our great detriment. To
understand why, all we need to do is think for a moment about the
cradle-to-grave philosophy of Hamas. Yes, what blares on the news are
suicide bombings that slaughter scores of innocents. But look underneath
them, at what Hamas is doing day-to-day. They don't just run
paramilitary training for adult jihadists. They start from the moment of
birth. From infancy, hatred is taught to children. They learn to hate
before they ever have a clue about what all the hatred is over. At home,
in mosques, in madrassas, in summer camps - dressed in battle fatigues
and hoods, and armed with mock weapons - it is fed to them.
And Hamas is not nearly alone. A funding spigot has been wide open for
years. We are better about trying to shut it down than we used to be,
but we're not even close to efficient yet. And even if we were to shut
it down tomorrow, there are hundreds of millions - maybe more - already
in the pipeline. Dollars that are contributed and controlled by the
worst Wahhabist and Salafist elements. Those dollars are funding hatred.
Hatred and the demonization of human beings simply because of who they
are.
Some suggest that our situation might benefit from making accommodations
- policy concessions that might mollify the militants and miraculously
change their attitude toward us. But let's think about a five-year-old
Muslim boy who has already gotten a sizable dose of the venom that is
found in the madrassas and the Arabic media.
I can assure you that that five-year-old kid does not hate American
foreign policy in the Persian Gulf. He does not hate the intractable
nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. What he hates is Jews. What
he hates is Americans. It is in the water he drinks and the air he
breathes. Sure, as he grows, he'll eventually be taught to hate American
foreign policy and what he'll forever be told is the "Israeli
occupation." But those abstractions are not the source of the child's
hatred, and changing them won't make the hatred go away - the hatred
that fuels the killing.
When I say I worry that we could lose this struggle against militant
Islam that we keep calling the "War on Terror," it is that fuel and that
hatred I am talking about. We have the world's most powerful, competent
military - it can capture and kill large numbers of terrorists. With the
help of our law-enforcement and intelligence agencies - especially
cutting off funding and cracking down on other kinds of material support
- our unified government can make a sizable dent in the problem. It can
give us periods like the last two years when there have been no
successful attacks on our homeland - although it is hard to take too
much comfort in that once you look at Bali, or Casablanca, or Istanbul,
or Baghdad, or Madrid.
Yes, we can have temporary, uneasy respites from the struggle. We cannot
win, however, until we can honestly say we are turning the tide of the
numbers. The madrassas are like conveyor belts. If they are churning out
more militants in waiting than we are capturing, killing, prosecuting,
or otherwise neutralizing, then we are losing this war.
It's not enough to deplete the militants' assets. We need to defeat
their ideas, and that means marginalizing their leaders. That means
talking about how Islam assimilates to American ideals and traditions.
It means making people take clear positions: making them stand up and be
counted - and be accountable - not letting them hide under murky labels
like "moderate".
As far as recognizing what we're really up against here, the terrorism
prosecutions of the 1990s were a powerful eye-opener. We saw up close
who the enemy was and why it was so crucial to be clear about it. Those
cases are generally thought to have begun with the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing - a horror that oddly seems mild compared to the carnage
we've witnessed in over a decade since. Yet, while that attack - the
militants' declaration of war - began the string of terrorism cases, it
was not really the start of the story.
That actually began years earlier. The men who carried out the World
Trade Center bombing spent years training for it, mostly in rural
outposts remote from Manhattan - like Calverton, Long Island, western
Pennsylvania, and northern Connecticut. There, they drilled in shooting,
hand-to-hand combat, and improvised explosive devices. From about 1988
on, they were operating here, and saw themselves as a committed jihad
army in the making.
They were fully convinced that their religion compelled them to
brutality. And unlike us, they had no queasiness: They were absolutely
clear about who their enemy was. They did not talk in jingos about the
"War on Freedom," or the "War on Liberty." They talked about the War on
America, the War on Israel, and the War on West. They were plainspoken
about whom they sought to defeat and why.
Their leader was a blind Egyptian cleric named Omar Abdel Rahman, the
emir of an international terrorist organization called the "Islamic
Group." This was a precursor of al Qaeda, responsible for the infamous
1981murder of Anwar Sadat for the great crime of making peace with
Israel. Abdel Rahman continues to this day to have a profound influence
on Osama bin Laden; his sons have been linked to al Qaeda, and one of
bin Laden's demands continues to be that America free the "Blind
Sheikh," who is now serving a life sentence.
Abdel Rahman laid out the principles of his terror group - including its
American division - with alarming clarity: Authority to rule did not
come from the people who are governed; it came only from Allah - a God
who, in Abdel Rahman's depiction, was not a God of mercy and
forgiveness, but a God of wrath and vengeance, and a God single-mindedly
consumed with the events of this world. For the Blind Sheikh and his
cohorts, there would be no toleration for other religions or other
views. There was militant Islam, and there was everybody else.
All the world was divided into two spheres - and it is very interesting
how those spheres were referred to: the first was Dar al Islam, or the
domain of the Muslims; the second was Dar al Harb. You might assume that
Dar al Harb would be the domain of the non-Muslims. It is not. It is
instead the domain of war. The militants perceive themselves as in a
constant state of war with those who do not accept their worldview.
Sometimes that war is hot and active. Sometimes it is in recess while
the militants take what they can get in negotiations and catch their
breath for the next rounds of violence. But don't be fooled: the war
never ends - unless and until all the world accepts their construction
of Islam.
As Abdel Rahman taught his adherents - and as the bin Ladens, the
Zawahiris, and the Zarqawis echo today - the manner of prosecuting the
never-ending war is jihad. This word is often translated as holy war; it
more closely means struggle.
We hear a lot today from the mainstream media about jihad. Usually, it's
a happy-face jihad, congenially rendered as "the internal struggle to
become a better person," or "the struggle of communities to drive out
drug peddlers," or "the struggle against disease, poverty and
ignorance." In many ways, these reflect admirable efforts to reconstruct
a very troubling concept, with an eye toward an Islam that blends into
the modern world.
But let's be clear: these are reconstructions. Jihad, in its
seventh-century origins, is a forcible, military concept. I realize
politesse frowns on saying such things out loud, but one of the main
reasons it is so difficult to discredit the militants - to say
convincingly that they have hijacked a peaceable religion - is this:
when they talk about this central tenet, jihad, as a duty to take up
arms, they have history and tradition on their side. As Abdel-Rahman,
the influential scholar with a doctorate from the famed al-Azhar
University in Egypt, instructed his followers: "There is no such thing
as commerce, industry, and science in jihad.... If Allah says: 'Do
jihad,' it means jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the
grenades, and with the missile. This is jihad. Jihad against God's
enemies for God's cause and his word."
So rich is the military pedigree of this term, jihad, that many of the
apologists concede it but try a different tack to explain it away:
"Sure, jihad means using force," they say, "but only in defense - only
when Muslims are under attack." Of course, who is to say what is
defensive? Who is to say when Muslims are under attack? For the
militants, Islam is under attack whenever anyone has the temerity to
say: "Islam - especially their brand of Islam - is not for me." For the
militants who will be satisfied with nothing less than the destruction
of Israel, Islam is under attack simply because Israelis are living and
breathing and going about their lives.
Simply stated, for Abdel Rahman, bin Laden, and those who follow them,
jihad means killing the enemies of the militants - which is pretty much
anyone who is not a militant. When your forces are outnumbered, and your
resources are scarce, it means practicing terrorism.
Abdel Rahman was brazen about it. As he said many times:
Why do we fear the word terrorist? If the terrorist is the person who
defends his right, so we are terrorists. And if the terrorist is the one
who struggles for the sake of God, then we are terrorists. We have been
ordered to terrorism because we must prepare what power we can to
terrorize the enemy of God. The Quran says the word "to strike terror."
Therefore, we don't fear to be called terrorists. They may say, "He is a
terrorist. He uses violence. He uses force." Let them say that. We are
ordered to prepare whatever we can of power to terrorize the enemies of
Islam.
It is frightening. But, as this makes clear, it is not simply the
militants' method that we are at war with. We are at war with their
ideology. Militant Islam has universalist designs. That sounds crazy to
us - we're from a diverse, tolerant, live-and-let-live culture. It's
hard for us to wrap our brains around a hegemonic worldview in the 21st
Century. But if we are going to appreciate the risk - the threat - we
face, the reality is: it matters much less what we think about the
militants than what they think about themselves.
The militants see terrorism as a perfectly acceptable way to go about
achieving their aims. When they succeed in destroying great, towering
symbols of economic and military might; when with a few cheap bombs
detonated on trains they can change the course of a national election;
it reinforces their convictions that their designs are neither grandiose
nor unattainable. It tells them that their method of choice works, no
matter what we may think of it.
Making our task even more difficult is the structure of Islam. As
Bernard Lewis and other notable scholars have observed, there are no
synods, and there is no rigorous hierarchy. There is no central power
structure to say with authority that this or that practice is heresy.
There is no pope available to say, "Sheikh Omar, blowing up civilians is
out of bounds. It is condemned."
So how does the conduct become condemned? How do we turn the tide?
Naturally, only Muslims themselves can cure Islam. Only they can
ultimately chart their course; only they can clarify and reform where
reform is so badly needed.
There is much, however, that we can do to help. It starts with ending
the free ride for the apologists and enablers of terrorists. We need to
be more precise in our language. We are not at war with terror. We are
at war with militant Islam. Militant Islam is our enemy. It seeks to
destroy us; we cannot co-exist with it. We need to defeat it utterly.
We seek to embrace moderate Muslims; to promote them, and to help them
win the struggle for what kind of religious, cultural and social force
Islam will be in the modern world. "Moderate," however, cannot just be a
fudge. It needs to be a real concept with a defined meaning.
What should that meaning be? Who are we trying to weed out? Well, last
year, the distinguished Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes proposed a few
questions - a litmus test of sorts. Useful questions, he said, might
include: Do you condone or condemn those who give up their lives to kill
enemy civilians? Will you condemn the likes of al Qaeda, Hamas, and
Hezbollah by name as terrorist groups? Is jihad, meaning a form of
warfare, acceptable in today's world? Do you accept the validity of
other religions? Should non-Muslims enjoy completely equal civil rights
with Muslims? Do you accept the legitimacy of scholarly inquiry into the
origins of Islam? Who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks? Do you
accept that institutions that fund terrorism should be shut down?
To be sure, we should have no illusions about all this. We are never
going to win every heart and mind. Asking these questions and questions
like them, though, would provoke a very necessary conversation. It could
begin to reveal who are the real moderates, and who are the pretenders.
It could begin to identify who are the friends of enlightenment and
tolerance, and who are the allies of brutality and inhumanity. It could
begin the long road toward empowering our friends and marginalizing our
enemies. Finally, it could make the War on Militant Islam a war we can
win - for ourselves and for the millions of Muslims who need our help.
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| NeoPhono |
| Yup, that's long. |
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| smokeape |
Serious enough read for the miltary. The Army is mobilizing the training structure to put more force into the Active Duty end strength as quickly as possible. Don't know how much longer they can recruit volunteers off of the street in the numbers they're looking for without lowering standards. I just happen to know these things.
:p
[[[smoke]]] |
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| arctic |
| quote: | Originally posted by NeoPhono
Yup, that's long. |
Haha, that just about sums up my feelings as well. Shakka, now you're becoming a chronic article poster - what is the world coming to? :nervous:
As for the article itself, can someone please clear the following up with me: how is a war on 'militant Islam' supposed to be fought? To me this sounds a hell of a lot like 'the war on drugs' or the 'war on poverty'. How are we supposed to fight a war against a concept? I'm sure there's a way, but at the moment, I've got no idea what that mysterious way is. |
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| Shakka |
| quote: | Originally posted by arctic
Haha, that just about sums up my feelings as well. Shakka, now you're becoming a chronic article poster - what is the world coming to? :nervous:
As for the article itself, can someone please clear the following up with me: how is a war on 'militant Islam' supposed to be fought? To me this sounds a hell of a lot like 'the war on drugs' or the 'war on poverty'. How are we supposed to fight a war against a concept? I'm sure there's a way, but at the moment, I've got no idea what that mysterious way is. |
It was merely an outside the box think piece forwarded on to me. I thought it was insightful enough to share if anyone wanted to take the time to read through it. I figured replies to this thread would be sparse, but hey it's just there if anyone wants to read it, I'm certainly not forcing anyone to read it.
I have posted a lot of articles lately. My apologies, I have just read a lot of interesting editorials and such lately. :cool: ;) |
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| NeoPhono |
| quote: | Originally posted by Shakka
It was merely an outside the box think piece forwarded on to me. I thought it was insightful enough to share if anyone wanted to take the time to read through it. I figured replies to this thread would be sparse, but hey it's just there if anyone wants to read it, I'm certainly not forcing anyone to read it.
I have posted a lot of articles lately. My apologies, I have just read a lot of interesting editorials and such lately. :cool: ;) |
Don't worry, I was just bustin' your balls. |
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| arctic |
| quote: | Originally posted by Shakka
It was merely an outside the box think piece forwarded on to me. I thought it was insightful enough to share if anyone wanted to take the time to read through it. I figured replies to this thread would be sparse, but hey it's just there if anyone wants to read it, I'm certainly not forcing anyone to read it.
I have posted a lot of articles lately. My apologies, I have just read a lot of interesting editorials and such lately. :cool: ;) |
Heh, I was just kidding as well. You're not an 'honest reporting' type article poster, so you're okay in my book. :p I'd still like someone to explain to me how we fight a war on a concept though. ;) |
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