President Obama sought to close a chapter in post-Sept. 11 history when he addressed the graduating class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in May.
“You are the first class to graduate since 9/11 who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan,” Obama told the graduating cadets, who applauded the idea.
But as the anniversary of the 2001 attacks approaches, that vision seems more distant than at any time since terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. U.S. troops are back in the fight in Iraq, and the debate in Washington has shifted from how to end the wars of the past 13 years to whether to start a new one against a more deadly version of the same enemy.
“The whole idea that we’re going to be able to turn the page on the wars of the last decade … that’s gone completely,” said retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan who is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a centrist think tank.
“I think we’re going to have to take a very serious strategic reappraisal,” Barno said.
Indeed, the threat from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is the principal reason why U.S. leaders are seeking a new way to fight what has come to be known as the “war on terrorism.” It’s the most extreme example yet of the fundamentalist Salafi version of Sunni Islam that has spawned al Qaeda and other groups such as Boko Haram in Nigeria and al Shabab in Somalia.
For many experts and former participants in the fight, the radical Islamist vision embraced by ISIS serves as a reminder that the United States has never had an effective strategy to combat that ideology — and badly needs one.
“It’s almost unbelievable that 13 years after 9/11 America does not have a strategy to confront radical jihadists,” said former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich.
From the start, the administration of former President George W. Bush, which coined the term “war on terror,” shied away from emphasizing the ideological nature of the struggle for fear of offending the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims.
The Obama administration went even further. In a June 29, 2011, speech introducing the administration’s counterterrorism strategy, CIA Director John Brennan, then the president’s top counterterrorism adviser, rejected the idea that the enemy had any connection to Islam.
“They purport to be Islamic, but they are neither religious leaders nor scholars,” Brennan said.
He also noted, in reference to the ISIS dream of re-establishing an Islamic caliphate, that “we are not going to organize our counterterrorism policies against a feckless delusion that is never going to happen.”
But atrocities attributed to ISIS — including the massacre of religious minorities (even other Muslims), beheading of children, and destruction of Muslim shrines — have prompted new calls from within the Muslim world itself for a strategy to counter extremist fringe groups, even from countries such as Saudi Arabia which previously supported them.
Though extremists make up a small minority of Muslims worldwide — a 2008 Gallup study found that 7 percent of Muslims worldwide were “politically radicalized” — they have sufficient numbers and funding to push Muslim-majority nations to the brink of crisis, just as ISIS has done in Iraq.
Saudi Arabia, where a variant of Salafi Islam is the state religion, played a major role in creating the problem and now must take the lead in solving it, Ed Husain, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior adviser to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, noted in an Aug. 22 New York Times op-ed.
“Saudi Arabia created the monster that is Salafi terrorism. It cannot now outsource the slaying of this beast to the United Nations,” wrote Husain, author of The Islamist, a book about his own journey through Islamist radicalism.
Many current and former U.S. officials see the threat from ISIS to other countries as an opportunity to build both a stronger international coalition against extremist ideologies and domestic support for decisive action — if Obama is willing to take the lead.
“Though we’re better prepared, the enemy is far stronger than they were on 9/11,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. “The president owes it to the American people to say how severe this is and how serious this is.”
U.S. leaders need to put the “political sludge” of the Iraq War debate behind them and do what it takes to confront the new threat there — even if it leads to the reintroduction of U.S. combat troops, said Pete Hegseth, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who now heads Concerned Veterans for America.
“First thing you need is leadership that will sell it, and the president’s got to be the one to do it,” he said.
