×
The Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens is widely respected on the right, and his arguments about terrorism here, in an anti-Obama column, are emblematic of some faulty ideas among hawks. So since we're gearing up to face John McCain, let's take a look.Stephens criticizes the political scientist Mark Sageman for believing that Iraq galvanized jihadists in a way that the war in Afghanistan didn't. Stephens' implication is that if you support the war in Afghanistan and are willing to live with some resulting rise in terrorism, you should be similarly sanguine about Iraq. He writes:
Even before the U.S. toppled the Taliban, Yusuf Qaradawi, the most influential cleric in the Sunni world, took to the airwaves to insist that "Islamic law says that if a Muslim country is attacked, the other Muslim countries must help it, with their souls and their money, until it is liberated. ... No doubt the invasion of Iraq did spur a younger generation of jihadis to new fits of apoplexy, particularly in Europe. Yet when Mohammed Bouyeri murdered Theo Van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, he was reacting to Mr. Van Gogh's film "Submission," which uncharitably depicts the treatment of women in Islam. Similarly, when mobs burned down the Danish embassy in Beirut, the "rage" turned on a dozen or so offending cartoons. The threshold for jihadist violence, it turns out, falls below whatever levels are set by current U.S. foreign policy to include what used to be known as free speech.Equating the murder of one Western filmmaker to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians is patently absurd. But furthermore, Sageman's argument isn't that terrorist leaders didn't try to arouse Muslim anger over Afghanistan in the same way they did over Iraq or Van Gogh's film, it's that they just weren't very effective at it. Terrorist leaders have been much more effective in arousing Muslim anger (and recruiting new terrorists) over Iraq, because Iraq resonated in a way that Afghanistan didn't. The Iraq war plays directly into the Al-Qaeda-constructed narrative whereby America and the West plunder Muslim lands to steal their oil and kill their people. The war in Afghanistan, while still opposed by many Muslims, was seen as retalitory and hence less anti-Islamic. Obviously bin Laden et al were furious about the West's toppling of the Taliban. But bin Laden is not our only audience. The other 1.3 billion Muslims in the world always need to be kept in mind.Implicit in Stephen's argument is the idea that if some jihadists are going to be upset over whatever actions we take, so it doesn't matter what actions we undertake in the Muslim world. This obscures the crucial issue of numbers. Obviously, there are some hard-cores like Qaradawi and Bouyeri who hate the West for theological reasons; they believe the West is licentious, in contempt of God, and filled with unbelievers. Sageman (or Obama, Stephens's larger target) doesn't deny this fact. But we can affect the other billion-plus Muslims. Former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke has made a good analogy, comparing the world's Muslim population to three concentric circles. Bin Laden-types are in the smallest circle (still filled with thousands), and they're not open to persuasion. But beyond that circle are two other circles, one comprised of Muslims who support the terrorists but who don't do any actual killing, and the final circle, the one in which most Muslims find themselves, filled with folks who are offended by Western actions and dislike parts of our culture, but who aren't going to kill us over it. Our strategy should be focused on preventing the third-circled Muslims from joining the other two circles. And invading Iraq pushed more of them into those circles than any other action we've taken.--Jordan Michael Smith
