First of a four-part series
Neither President George W. Bush nor President Obama correctly defined the war we’re in or what would constitute victory.
Bush said victory in Iraq was creation of a democracy that could defend, govern and sustain itself and be an ally in the larger war. But Bush never led us to understand who and what the adversary in the larger war really was.
Obama disdains victory. He’s said that he’s not about all that surrender-on-the-deck-of-the-USS Missouri stuff. Soon after becoming president, he banned the use of the term “war on terrorism” from official statements, which is all well and good because terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. But — as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and so many other incidents proved — the threat is existential.
So who and what must we defeat, then, to end this threat? Will it ever be possible to return to a pre-9/11 world in which we don’t have to take our shoes off to get on an airliner? Probably not.
So who and what must we defeat, then, to end this threat? Will it ever be possible to return to a pre-9/11 world in which we don’t have to take our shoes off to get on an airliner? Probably not.
The events this year — the Fort Hood massacre and the events aboard Northwest flight 253 — show that the danger is growing, not shrinking.
Twenty-three-year-old Nigerian jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s Christmas Day attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253 carrying nearly 300 passengers and crew members from Amsterdam to Detroit reminds us that terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and the nations that sponsor them — Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, to name the worst three — will spare no effort to destroy our way of life. So why do they make war on us, and how do we defeat them?
It’s always the jihad. The principal threat to America emanates from the Islamic nations that sponsor terrorism and the ideology that propels them.
Until those nations are forced to cease sponsoring terrorism, or until we lose our freedom and way of life, the war will go on. There is no third choice.
To defeat these nations requires much more than defeating them in the kinetic war. The call to jihad — to terrorism — will continue unless and until the ideology of radical Islam is defeated.
For that is what it is: Radical Islam is an evil ideology, as evil as communism and Nazism were. We have to use all the tools that defeated them to defeat this global threat.
Islam is a religion, an integration of beliefs and assertions that prescribes worship in a particular way. But radical Islam, we must insist, is different. Though it stems from a set of religious beliefs, it is also a hegemonic and aggressive ideology that requires of its adherents that they either enslave or wage war against nonbelievers.
Such an ideology cannot be defeated with guns alone. But it can and must be defeated in the war of ideas, which we have not chosen to fight.
And to accomplish that, we have to do two things: First, to prove that the freedoms our Constitution preserves are superior to enslavement by any ideological theology; and, second, to attack — in the war of ideas — those who insist that there is no division within Islamic thought, and thus compel them to the task of introspection, for which they now deny the need. When so-called moderate Islamic leaders, such as Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, say that there is no such thing as “moderate” Islam, our national leaders should engage him on that battlefield.
In August 2007, Erdogan rejected the “moderate” label of his AK Party, saying, “These descriptions are very ugly. It is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that’s it.”
But President Bush — who said again and again that we weren’t at war with Islam — didn’t answer Erdogan. Bush should have said that by his statement, Erdogan was allying himself with the worst of the Iranian ayatollahs, the most radical of the Saudi clerics and every terrorist who murders in the name of his god, and challenged Erdogan to divorce himself from them.
But Bush didn’t. He remained silent. And, worse, Obama, in his June speech in Cairo, proclaimed that Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The perception Obama created was positive. But from Thomas Jefferson’s defensive war against the Barbary Pirates — who were conducting the first modern jihad by capturing Western ships and holding them for ransom — to the murderous rampage at Fort Hood, Islam’s role in American history has always been embodied in jihadist adversaries.
Our politically correct administration shuns the idea of judging others. It is multiculturalism at its worst: The refusal to say that a society that fights to preserve the most basic freedoms — of religion, the press and all the other principles in our Bill of Rights — is no better than one that murders to suppress those freedoms.
Muslims value learning above all else. But their leaders define the highest and most valuable studies only in terms of learning obedience to Islamic law.
That is why democracy cannot be built among those whose culture defines itself — as radical Islam does — as intolerant of other religions and which seeks hegemony over those who do not share its particular brand of intolerance.
President Reagan understood the power of ideas. When he condemned the Soviet Union as an evil empire, when his speeches embraced those who fought for freedom such as Lech Walesa and Poland’s Solidarity Movement, he helped free the millions who suffered under communist oppression.
If we are to defeat radical Islam, our national leaders must understand this, and follow Reagan’s example in every thought, in every speech and in every action.
