Congressional Republicans are pushing for a broader, more aggressive approach to counter the threat of Islamist extremism against a White House strategy they see as too passive and politically correct. This is a risky political move after more than 13 years of war, but one they think may be necessary to confront a growing danger.
Concern about President Obama’s unwillingness to even describe the terrorist threat as “Islamist” colors nearly every national security debate on Capitol Hill, including consideration of his proposed authorization for the use of force against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and oversight of policies for combating extremist activity at home.
“Today we are at war. We’re at war with violent Islamist extremism, the perversion of a religion into a deeply insidious worldview,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said Thursday in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.
“For six years, the president has denied it and has put our nation on a path of retreat. This denial has allowed our enemies to surge.”
There is widespread agreement among those on the front lines of the fight that the popularity of the Islamist extremist ideology is fueling a greater danger of violent attacks worldwide, not the least because of the Islamic State’s success in recruiting and mobilizing sympathizers using sophisticated modern communications strategies to spread its message on social media.
“The trend lines are alarming. We are seeing considerable year-on-year increases in both the number of terrorist attacks and fatalities due to terrorism,” William Braniff, executive director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism told the House Armed Services Committee on Friday, noting that seven of the 10 most lethal terrorist groups in the world were violent jihadi groups.
But the growing threat has come just as Americans were anticipating the end of 13 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, which cost more than $1 trillion, killed nearly 7,000 U.S. service members and left many wondering what tangible success had been achieved. The hangover from that divisive era creates political risks for any lawmaker who seeks to put the United States back on war footing.
Obama, who rode the antiwar feeling into office in the 2008 election and promised to end U.S. involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has reluctantly sent limited U.S. forces back into action in response to the threat posed by the Islamic State. Both his request for congressional authorization for continued military action and the administration’s recently released national security strategy emphasize the need for limits to U.S. involvement against the extremist group.
The White House is hosting a summit on Wednesday “to highlight domestic and international efforts to prevent violent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting, or inspiring individuals or groups in the United States and abroad to commit acts of violence, efforts made even more imperative in light of recent, tragic attacks in Ottawa, Sydney and Paris,” according to a Jan. 11 statement from press secretary Josh Earnest.
But the White House statement makes no reference to the Islamist extremist ideology that motivated attackers in all of those incidents. Officials have said they avoid using that term so as not to give legitimacy to the extremists’ claim to speak for Islam.
The GOP case for a stepped-up campaign has been bolstered by comments from experts such as retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a highly regarded former intelligence officer in both Iraq and Afghanistan who abruptly left his post as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in August amid reports he had been forced out.
In testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on Friday, Flynn criticized the administration’s strategy against the Islamic State as insufficient, and called for a global, multi-generational campaign against the Islamist extremist ideology, those who follow it and those who support or accommodate it, even if they currently are considered partners of the United States.
“There’s no cheap way to win this fight,” he said.
There’s also a growing realization in the Islamic world that the ideological issue must be confronted, even among governments that in the past have been reluctant to do so for political reasons, because the Islamic State and other extremist groups have become a direct threat to their existence.
For example, the government of the United Arab Emirates in November placed two U.S. Muslim groups on its list of banned terrorist organizations because of their ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, even though those groups had benefited in the past from funding by Emiratis.
The Islamic State has been effective at attracting support from Muslims with a fully-fledged ideology of jihad that draws upon well-known stories from Islamic history, Hassan Hassan, an analyst at the Delma Institute in Abu Dhabi and co-author of an upcoming book about the Islamic State, wrote in Britain’s Guardian daily last week.
“Islamic traditions are filled with stories of mercy and tolerance. But it is not enough to tell these stories in isolation from other dark chapters in Islamic history that feed groups such as [the Islamic State],” Hassan wrote. “What the group does is to match its practices with the ‘practical’ history of Islam, even though many rightly view these practices as contradictory to Islamic teachings.”
