A Triumph of Ideology over Evidence
Peter Wehner
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a790435558~db=all~order=page

Philip H. Gordon is an intelligent man and a fine scholar. And ‘Winning
the Right War’ makes some valid arguments (for example, highlighting the
‘resource gap’ between the rhetoric of the war against militant Islam and
the resources devoted to it). But in the main I found his essay to be flawed,
simplistic, and in some places even sloppy.

Some of Gordon’s criticisms of the Bush administration are legitimate – I
have written and spoken about those failures, especially related to Iraq, elsewhere
– but he undermines them by presenting what is essentially a one-sided and
misleading legal brief. It creates a distorted picture of American policy
and the state of the war against jihadism. And it advances caricatures instead
of deepening our understanding of the grave, complicated issues we face.
Let me cite some specific examples. Among Gordon’s six ‘fundamental
problems’ with the war on terror the United States has been fighting so far
is ‘alienating allies’. Gordon argues that more than six years after the attacks
on 11 September 2001, in many important respects ‘America is just about
the only one left’. He accuses the Bush administration of ‘neglecting diplomacy’
and that, in an age of democracies, ‘global resentment makes it harder
for leaders to cooperate with the United States, and harder for America to
achieve its goals throughout the world’.

Gordon’s ‘almost alone’ thesis is undermined by stubborn facts. For
example, the United States has gained unprecedented cooperation in the
war on terror from countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.
Traditional allies in Europe have helped in tracking, arresting, and blocking
the funding for terrorists. We’re witnessing unprecedented cooperation in
law enforcement, intelligence, military action and diplomacy.

To take just one example: on 10 August 2006 British authorities, working
closely with the United States and Pakistan, broke up a plot by Islamic terrorists
to blow up as many as 10 planes in flight from the UK to the United
States. The goal was to inflict ‘mass murder on an unimaginable scale’,
according to British police.

More than 70 countries have joined the Proliferation Security Initiative,
sharing intelligence information, tracking suspect international cargo, and
conducting joint military exercises to deny terrorists, rogue states and their
supplier networks access to nuclear-, biological- and chemical-weaponsrelated
materials and delivery systems.

It’s worth noting that the build-up of the Proliferation Security Initiative
and many of America’s multilateral efforts to defeat jihadists happened
concurrently with the Iraq War, demonstrating that the United States can
handle alliance friction, which is sometimes inevitable, and alliance cooperation
at the same time.

In 2003 the United States and its allies obtained a commitment from Libya
to abandon its chemical- and nuclear-weapons programmes and, according
to the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iran halted its nuclearweapons
programme. (Both happened in the immediate aftermath of the
decapitation of both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s regime. The use of
American force seemed to have concentrated the minds of both the Libyan
and Iranian leaderships.)

American and allied intelligence officers uncovered and shut down a
sophisticated black-market network headed by A.Q. Khan, the architect of
Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons programme. In addition, NATO has taken over
command of international forces in Afghanistan, the first mission in NATO’s
history outside the Euro-Atlantic region.

For Gordon’s thesis to have merit, then, he would have to rewrite most
of the history of the past six years. He would have to erase virtually all of
the day-to-day activity of the war on terror, which as a practical matter consists
of unprecedented levels of cooperation and integrated planning across
scores of countries, both long-time allies and new partners.

All of this calls to mind the scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian
in which the Judean ‘guerrillas’ debate whether the Roman Empire has
brought any good to the Holy Land. John Cleese’s character asks rhetorically
what good the Romans have done. After his men point out one benefit
after another, the Cleese character is obliged to say: ‘All right, but apart from
the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads,
a fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done
for us?’

Apart from the vast number of multilateral anti-terrorism initiatives
from 2001 to the present, when has the Bush administration ever worked in
partnership with other countries?

None of this is to deny that there have been strains between America
and some of its allies. And all of us would prefer comity to acrimony. But
Gordon fails to grapple with, or even concede the existence of, tensions that
sometimes exist when the choice is between acting in the national interest
and gaining higher approval ratings in foreign countries. Sometimes the
United States might act in ways that it judges to be right and necessary but
alienate other nations. For example, the New York Times reported this on 22
August 1998:

In mosques, on street corners, and from some government ministries,
many Muslims voiced fury today over the American missile strikes in
Afghanistan and Sudan and predicted that the assault would beget more
violence. The condemnations came from around the Islamic world, and
were issued by clerics, officials, and ordinary citizens.1

Obviously it would be better if America were not the object of fury in
the Muslim world – but does that mean that President Clinton, for whom
Gordon worked during his employment at the National Security Council,
was wrong to strike against what he deemed to be terrorist targets?

It’s true as well that when America overthrew the Taliban regime, the
United States became more unpopular in the Islamic world. That is regrettable;
but even Gordon would agree, I suspect, that America was right to
strike back.

And if the situation is as bad as Gordon says, how does he explain the fact
that we have seen two strongly pro-American leaders, Nicolas Sarkozy in
France and Angela Merkel in Germany, emerge in European nations where
the anti-American animus was said to run deepest?

A second example of where I think Gordon gets it wrong: in his essay, he
writes that Osama bin Laden remains at large; that the Iraq War has become
(quoting bin Laden) a ‘golden opportunity’ for al-Qaeda to recruit new
troops and has ‘inspired’ them; that al-Qaeda has been handed great gifts
by the Bush administration; and that our enemies are stronger and America
is less safe. Reading ‘Winning the Right War’, you would think that for al-
Qaeda specifically, and jihadists more broadly, life is now a sail on a summer
sea.

This picture is deeply misleading. What you never learn from Gordon’s
essay is the tremendous damage that has been inflicted against al-Qaeda
since 11 September 2001. It has lost a sanctuary in Afghanistan. Most of its
leaders have been either captured or killed. Its network has been disrupted.
And intercepts indicate that relentless pressure against al-Qaeda is paying
off.

In Iraq, the ‘surge’, by almost every security metric, is succeeding – and
succeeding faster than even those of us who advocated it could imagine.
Since General David Petraeus, the commanding general of US forces in Iraq,
began putting his counter-insurgency plan into effect in early 2007, we’ve
seen a dramatic decrease in American combat casualties, Iraqi civilian casualties,
suicide bombings and roadside bombings; an increase in local population support
for US efforts; Shi’ites in Baghdad turning against Moqtada al- Sadr’s Mahdi Army;
‘bottom up’ reconciliation between Shi’ite and Sunni; the distribution of oil revenues
(even absent laws mandating it); early signs that the huge refugeeflow out of Iraq
has begun to reverse itself; and a decrease by half in thenumber of foreign jihadists
entering Iraq.

In addition, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia has absorbed tremendous punishment.
An October 2007 front-page story in the Washington Post, co-written
by Thomas Ricks (whom Gordon cites favourably in his essay), begins this
way: ‘The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible
blows to al Qaeda in Iraq in recent months’.2

Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst and a Brookings Institution colleague
of Gordon’s, summed things up this way in November 2007: ‘These
trends [in Iraq] are stunning in military terms and beyond the predictions of
most proponents of the surge last winter’.3

Iraq remains an enormous challenge. It is a fragile, traumatised, and in
many respects a broken country. The central government still needs to do
much more to advance political reconciliation. But across the board, repairs
are being made.

Perhaps the most important development in the war against militant
Islam is the widespread rejection of bin Ladenism among Sunni Iraqis,
which started in Anbar Province and has spread to much of the rest of Iraq.
Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer put it this way:

Having poisoned one country and been expelled from it (Afghanistan),
al-Qaeda seized upon post-Hussein instability to establish itself in the
very heart of the Arab Middle East – Sunni Iraq. Yet now, in front of all
the world, Iraq’s Sunnis are, to use the biblical phrase, vomiting out al-
Qaeda. This is a defeat and humiliation in the extreme – an Arab Muslim
population rejecting al-Qaeda so violently that it allies itself in battle with
the infidel, the foreigner, the occupier.4

In September 2007 we saw another stunning and significant, if largely ignored,
development. Sheik Salman al-Awdah, a prominent cleric in Saudi Arabia
whom bin Laden himself has lionised, strongly condemned bin Laden in an
‘open letter’.5 Three month later, a senior al-Qaeda ideological and theological
figure, Sayyed Imam al-Sharif, harshly criticised bin Laden and Ayman
al-Zawahiri, saying the attacks on 11 September were a ‘catastrophe for all
Muslims’ and going so far as to recommend a special sharia court be formed
to try both bin Laden and Zawahiri.5 And in a 22 October audiotape, bin
Laden criticised his followers for using tactics that have deeply estranged
Iraqis. ‘Mistakes have been made during holy wars’, he said. ‘Some of you
have been lax in one duty, which is to unite your ranks.’6

Not surprisingly, a recent Pew poll revealed that the popularity of both
bin Laden and suicide bombings is falling in the Middle East. According to
a summary of the 24 July 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Project:

the survey finds large and growing numbers of Muslims in the Middle
East and elsewhere rejecting Islamic extremism. The percentage of
Muslims saying that suicide bombing is justified in the defense of Islam
has declined dramatically over the past five years in five of eight countries
where trends are available [and declined overall in seven of the eight
countries where trend data are available]. In Lebanon, for example, just
34% of Muslims say suicide bombings in the defense of Islam are often or
sometimes justified; in 2002, 74% expressed this view.7

The Pew report itself states:

The marked decline in the acceptance of suicide bombing is one of several
findings that suggest a possible broader rejection of extremist tactics among
many in the Muslim world. In many of the countries where support for
suicide attacks has fallen there also have been large drops in support for
Osama bin Laden.8

What we are seeing, then, is precisely the ‘discrediting [of] the extremist
ideas of our enemies’ that Gordon recommends at the end of his essay, yet
he seems wholly unaware that it is happening now. Could this be explained
by the fact that it’s happening on the watch of George W. Bush, of whom
Gordon has almost nothing favourable to say?

On the overall progress in the war against militant Islam, the Iranianborn
journalist Amir Taheri has written:

Algeria, Egypt, and Turkey have effectively defeated their respective
terrorist enemies. Yemen has crushed both Sunni and Shiite terrorist groups
that tried to create mini-‘emirates’ on its territory. The Islamofascists have
also suffered defeat in Kashmir, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and
Chechnya.9

Many, though certainly not all, of these developments have happened since
Gordon published his essay. But nowhere did he acknowledge any of these
developments or predict they were possible. The picture he paints is unremittingly
bleak – and, it turns out, incomplete and in some instances just
plain wrong.

A third area of disagreement: Gordon asserts that ‘the Bush strategy is
also based on the assumption that the very demonstration of resolve will
help deter future attacks’. He goes on:

It is an odd suggestion that people willing to die for their cause would
be deterred by our greater willingness to kill them, but the president and
his supporters have often asserted that America’s failure to impress the
terrorists in this way was what led to the 11 September attacks in the first
place. (p. 24)

In fact, one factor that made terrorism a ‘growth industry’ in the 1990s was
the perception by jihadists that they would prevail against the United States
by wearing it down and breaking its will. They (not Bush and Cheney)
believed America and the West were soft, irresolute, demoralised and decadent.
‘[Americans are] the most cowardly of God’s creatures’, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who became (until his death) the leader of al-
Qaeda in Mesopotamia, said.10

To underscore this point, here are the words of Osama bin Laden in
1998:

We have seen in the last decade the decline of the American government
and the weakness of the American soldier who is ready to wage Cold
Wars and unprepared to fight long wars. This was proven in Beirut when
the Marines fled after two explosions. It also proves they can run in less
than 24 hours, and this was also repeated in Somalia … [Our] youth
were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized
more than before that the American soldiers are paper tigers. After a few
blows, they ran in defeat and America forgot about all the hoopla and
media propaganda after leaving the Gulf War. After a few blows, they
forgot about this title [leader of a new world order] and left, dragging their
corpses and their shameful defeat.11

American irresolution did in fact embolden jihadists.

Finally, on the matter of sloppiness: in his essay, Gordon cites a story by
Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, who wrote a highly critical article on
the President’s 2006 State of the Union. Gordon writes this:

In reality, … as Glenn Kessler noted in the Washington Post, ‘[Bush’s]
description of the actions of “the enemy” tried to tie together a series of
diplomatic and military setbacks that had virtually no connection to one
another, from an attack on a Sunni mosque in Iraq to the assassination of
[a] Maronite Lebanese political figure.‘

The problem with this quote is that the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra that
was attacked on 22 February 2006 is Shia, not Sunni. The difference is hardly
incidental; the mosque, after all, is among the holiest sites in Shia Islam (the
mosque holds the tombs of two revered ninth-century imams of the Shia
branch of Islam, including Hassan al-Askari, father of the ‘hidden imam’,
al-Mahdi). For Glenn Kessler, a reporter, to write that the mosque is Sunni
rather than Shia was sloppy; and for Philip Gordon, a scholar, to favourably
cite it is doubly so.

The core problem with Gordon’s essay, I think, is that it is a triumph of ideology.
‘Winning the Right War’ leaves the impression that virtually everything
the Bush administration has done since 11 September 2001 has been misguided,
wrong and counterproductive, and that virtually everything has
worked to the advantage of jihadists during the last six years. One need not
believe that everything the Bush administration has done is right to know
that this impression is false. The essay itself has the feel of being written by a
scholar who settled on a thesis early on and wasn’t about to let contrary facts
or reality intrude on it, or on his final judgements. It shows, and Gordon’s
essay is poorer for it.

Notes

1 See Douglas Jehl, ‘After The Attacks: The Reaction; U.S. Raids Provoke Fury
in Muslim World’, New York Times, 22 August 1998.
2 Thomas Ricks and Karen DeYoung, ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq Reported Crippled’,
Washington Post, 15 October 2007.
3 See Cara Buckley and Michael R. Gordon, ‘US Says Attacks in Iraq Fell
to Feb. 2006 Level’, New York Times, 19 November 2007.
4 Charles Krauthammer, ‘Petraeus’s Success’, Washington Post, 14 September 2007.
5 See Eli Lake, ‘Senior Qaeda Theologian Urges His Followers To
End Their Jihad’, New York Sun, 20 December 2007.
6 See Lee Keath, ‘Bin Laden Asks Iraq  Insurgents to Unite’, Associated Press,
22 October 2007.
7 See Summary of Findings, ‘Global Opinion Trends 2002–2007: A Rising Tide Lifts Mood
in the Developing World; Sharp Decline in Support for Suicide Bombing in Muslim Countries’,
The Pew Global Attitudes Project, 24 July 2007.
8 Ibid., p. 57.
9 See Amir Taheri, ‘What Kind of War Are We Fighting, and Can We Win
It? A Symposium’, Commentary, November 2007.
10 See http://www.cpa.gov/transcripts/20040212_zarqawi_full.html.
11 See interview with Osama bin Laden by John Miller, ABC News correspondent,
28 May 1998.


Al-Qaida's Fading Victory: The Madrid Precedent
By Austin Bay
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/AustinBay/2008/03/12/al-qaidas_fading_victory_the_madrid_precedent

Al-Qaida's terror attacks on March 11, 2004 (just prior to Spain's national elections), sought to establish the "Madrid Precedent," a strategic extension of what al-Qaida's planners in their "Letters to the Africa Corps" had called the examples of Mogadishu, Somalia, and Beirut, Lebanon. Stated crudely, Beirut (U.S. Marine barracks, 1983) and Mogadishu ("Blackhawk Down," 1993) told al-Qaida that if "we kill enough, they will withdraw."

Islamists murdered 191 Spaniards and wounded 1,800 on 3-11. Unlike Beirut, the "Madrid Precedent" targeted civilians in Spanish territory -- but on al-Qaida's map of the global caliphate, Spain is "al Andalus," a Muslim domain stolen by the Reconquista.

In the post-attack wave of hysteria, "Socialist peace candidate" Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was elected Spain's prime minister. He immediately withdrew Spanish troops serving in Iraq.

Hence the "Madrid Precedent" -- attack a democracy just before an election with the aim of electing a "peace candidate" who thinks al-Qaida's killers can be appeased.

Al-Qaida needed a Madrid Precedent. The "9-11 Precedent" hadn't worked as planned. Rather than perishing like a fire-struck Sodom or becoming "quagmired" in Afghanistan like the lurching Soviet military, the United States responded aggressively and creatively, and with an unexpected agility.

Moreover, America had chosen not merely to topple al-Qaida's Taliban allies, but had made the bold decision to go to "the heart of the matter" and wage a war for the terms of modernity in the center of the politically dysfunctional Arab Muslim Middle East.

Don't think that al-Qaida's leaders didn't know that stroke -- establishing a democracy in Iraq -- represented a fatal threat to the terrorist organization.

Al-Qaida's dark genius had been to connect the Muslim world's angry, humiliated and isolated young men with a utopian fantasy preaching the virtue of violence. That utopian fantasy sought to explain and then redress roughly 800 years of Muslim decline. The rage energizing al-Qaida's ideological cadres certainly predated the post-Desert Storm presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia.

In February 2004, al-Qaida's "emir in Iraq," Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, bluntly noted he faced defeat. Islamist radicals were "failing to enlist support" and had "been unable to scare the Americans into leaving." Once the Iraqis established their own democracy, Zarqawi opined, al-Qaida was lost. Moreover, a predominantly Arab Muslim democracy offered the Muslim world an alternative to al-Qaida's liturgy of embedded grievance. Zarqawi's solution to looming failure was to murder Iraqi Shias and ignite a "sectarian war."

Politically inducing the withdrawal of coalition troops from Iraq was another route to thwarting Iraqi democracy.

Zapatero, a man steeped in the European left's liturgical anti-Americanism, came through for the bin Ladenites.

But it didn't work. Oh, Spanish troops left. Ironically, I arrived in Iraq for military duty as the Spaniards were departing. An operations sergeants told me the Spanish soldiers were crack professionals who had a high opinion of themselves -- a cocky esprit. "What about their opinion of Zapatero?" I asked. The sergeant scowled. Well, I thought, what kind of soldier likes it when his own politicians deal him a defeat?

In spring 2008, the "Iraq Precedent" -- forged by the Iraqi people with American help -- looks increasingly persuasive. Will the Iraq Precedent sway the Muslim world's disenchanted? It has had some success, and al-Qaida knows this: An increasing number of Muslims consider al-Qaida to be a criminal gang. However, cultural and political change is slow. We will have a better idea in a couple of decades.

Meanwhile, back in the United States: Democratic candidate Barack Obama promises a rapid withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. I can't call his plan the Obama Precedent because Hillary Clinton has toyed with the idea -- of course, she toys with many ideas, depending on the crowd.

But, golly gee, Obama may be spinning us -- you know, old-time campaign talk from the man promising change? Yes, his key foreign policy adviser Samantha Power has resigned (she called Hillary "a monster"), but before Power quit she suggested to the BBC's Stephen Sackur on March 6 that Obama's retreat pledge was iffy. "You can't make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009," Power said. "He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he's crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. senator."

It appears Obama is pandering to left-wing voters steeped in defeatism, and if elected president, come January 2009, he may suddenly discover the Iraq Precedent is a damn sight better than any other option.

Austin Bay Austin Bay is author of three novels. His third novel, The Wrong Side of Brightness, was published by Putnam/Jove in June 2003. He has also co-authored four non-fiction books, to include A Quick and Dirty Guide to War: Third Edition (with James Dunnigan, Morrow, 1996).