Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, did the nation a bit of a disservice last week in his response to questions as to whether the foiled multiplane massacre planned in the United Kingdom was perpetrated by al-Qaida. Chertoff answered rather meekly that the plan was “in some respects suggestive on an al-Qaida plot.”
The answer he should have given was an unequivocal statement that it is absolutely irrelevant whether this was al-Qaida per se, but that it was part and parcel of an international jihadist threat, not only to the United States, but to the entire civilized world.
The question itself begs several others about the nature and structure of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida, but it also betrays a level of ignorance about Islamist terrorism that is both alarming and dangerous.
From Afghanistan to Iraq, from London to Madrid, there is a global threat to the values of enlightened liberalism which must be recognized and forcibly challenged. For Chertoff or any other administration official to try to discern for the sake of threat assessment which jihadists are and which are not directly under the command of bin Laden is an exercise in suicidal futility.
Still, there are helpful ways to explain and clarify the organizational structure of the jihadist threat commonly associated with bin Laden and al-Qaida. Most prominent of them comes from Marc Sageman, who in “Understanding Terror Networks” aptly describes a complex and interconnected network of divergent groups, a global social movement made up of “fanatics yearning for martyrdom and eager to kill.” But even this prescient analysis is gradually losing its relevance in a world where al-Qaida (which translates as “the base”) has morphed from a connected network of like-minded groups into an ideology that permeates radical Islamist thinking worldwide.
Another way to describe al-Qaida’s structure and its global reach uses the language of the technological revolution, positing al-Qaida versions 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. Here, bin Laden and his immediate cohorts make up version 1.0, other organizations he directly supports are version 2.0, and groups unconnected to bin Laden but inspired by his ideas are version 3.0. This model simplifies the complexity of network analysis in favor of concentric circles of terrorists that are not explicitly al-Qaida members, but which share bin Laden’s murderous ideology while operating independent of any centralized command.
But perhaps superior to both the network and technological models is the more direct and all-encompassing notion of a Jihadi International. Here we are forced to grapple with the reality that the war in which we are now engaged is global and total — and somewhat analogous to the Cold War, when the United States and our allies recognized our common enemy as primarily an ideological one, but also one in which the enemy was literally everywhere. Including among us.
For his part, President George W. Bush seems to be shifting his rhetoric in this direction. The president was bold and specific in his wording last week, clarifying that the plan to simultaneously down multiple passenger jets was the byproduct of Islamic fascism — obviously meant to distinguish among peaceful Muslims and those who use their religion as a divine justification for mass murder. President Bush should be commended for moving from the general “war on terror” terminology to more accurate language. And while some apologist Muslims will feign righteous indignation over the label, their failure to condemn the enemies of humanity within their midst should not stop the administration from fulfilling its primary duty of protecting the lives of Americans, at home or abroad.
So hopefully the media’s attempt to classify last week’s attempted terrorist attacks can act as a catalyst to finally move beyond the unhelpful focus on bin Laden and al-Qaida. Instead, we must recognize that we face a larger threat and a very real enemy that claims the religious prerogative to forcibly convert or kill all nonbelievers.
In short, Islamic fascists.
Matthew O’Gara, Ph.D., is a lecturer at The Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.
