The three attacks also have scored a bulls-eye in damaging the confidence of Americans that their government can protect them. London is the best-policed city in the Western world, and the British Security Service (BSS, or MI5) is likewise that world’s finest national-level security organization. Egypt is a police state and is protected by efficient and ruthless police services, whose activities are virtually unencumbered by civil-liberty or human-rights concerns. In each country, the Islamist attackers struck precisely where and when they wanted to. Neither the British nor the Egyptian police and security services had the slightest inkling that an attack was imminent; indeed, the U.K. government lowered its alert level just before the 7 July attacks.
What this means for America is clear: at home, the United States is virtually defenseless. The director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, has presided over a hundred-million-dollar failure to purchase a workable computer system for his officers. He also has publicly endorsed the belief of his senior lieutenants that knowledge of the Middle East and Islamic extremism is not essential for FBI officers working against al Qaeda. For breathtakingly obtuse perspectives that expose the limited perspective and brain power of the Mueller-backed senior FBI officers, try these on for size. In a sworn statement, Dale Watson, the FBI’s counterterrorism chief from 2001 to 2003, said, “A bombing case is a bombing case. A crime scene in a bank robbery case is the same as a crime scene … across the board.” He added the only thing an FBI officer needed to know to fight terrorism is “the attorney general’s guidelines for counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigation.” Gary Bald, one of Watson’s successors, added that knowledge of Islam and the Middle East was not needed by FBI officers. “You need leadership,” Bald said. “You don’t need subject matter expertise. It is certainly not what I look for in selecting an official for a counterterrorism position.” Today, the FBI remains what it was before 9/11, an organization of smart, dedicated men and women at the working level who are led—at least under Judge Freeh, Mr. Mueller, and their senior lieutenants—by incompetent and unreformable bureaucrats more interested in protecting the FBI’s reputation than in protecting Americans.6
Adding to this disaster was the 15 July 2005 announcement by Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), that he had ordered a “massive overhaul” of DHS’s intelligence apparatus. This arm of DHS was “designed to be the [U.S.] government’s chief center for analyzing information about terrorist threats,” and was “the foundation of why the department was stood up.”7 Chertoff’s announcement signals that four years after 9/11, the masters of U.S. domestic security are sprinting back to the drawing board. And as lethal coda to the foregoing, the Congress has, in a knowing and bipartisan manner, hamstrung U.S. law enforcement at all levels of government by its four-year failure to act to protect our borders and enforce immigration laws already on the books. As always, Congress can be counted on to be devoid of common sense and fail to do the minimum. Score two for bin Laden.
Finally, the West’s reaction to the July 2005 attacks has reassured bin Laden and his allies that Washington and its allies continue to deliberately ignore their enemies’ motivation and lie to their publics on that issue. In rhetorical responses as predictable as they are pathetic, Pavlovian Western leaders and pundits continued to assert that their countries are being attacked by Islamist militants because of “who we are and what we believe, not what we do in the Muslim world.” British prime minister Tony Blair was first out of the box, singing that old, sweet song proclaiming, “we are confronting an evil ideology” and emphasizing his belief that the attackers distorted Islam, were relatively few in number, and were mere criminals. “It is not a clash of civilizations,” Blair said.
All civilised people, Muslim or other, feel revulsion at it. But it is a global struggle. It is a battle of ideas and hearts and minds, both within Islam and outside it…. This is the battle that must be won. A battle not just about terrorists’ methods but their views. Not just their barbaric ideas but their barbaric acts. Not only about what they do but what they think, and the thinking they would impose on others…. In the end, it is by the power of argument, debate, true religious faith and true legitimate politics that we will defeat this threat.8
Blair’s formula, as always, boils down to the idea that none of the Western threats to Islam perceived by Islamists, their millions of followers, and their tens of millions of sympathizers are legitimate, and that the West need change no policies toward the Muslim world. Victory, says Blair, lies in teaching Muslims that what the West wants is good for them, and that, to use his own phrase, Western thinking is what he and his allies will “impose on others”—read Muslims. The ardent multiculturalism-diversity monger Blair avoided noting that unchanged Western policies toward the Islamic world mean his brand of “imposing” must be done by bayonet, while simultaneously striving to make Her Majesty’s subjects believe the Islamist threat can be erased simply by his media-soaked, nonstop round of consultation and kumbayah-ing with Muslim leaders in the U.K.
In a fascinating pairing of opposites, the socialist Blair was, after the 7 July attacks, joined by President George W. Bush and his neoconservative acolytes in an effort to prevent any erosion of the Big Lie that holds al Qaeda is attacking the West for what it is, not what it does. Like Blair, Mr. Bush is nothing if not consistent. He assured Americans “[t]he attack on London was an attack on the civilized world” and on that world’s liberties and freedoms. The president took Blair’s version of the Big Lie as his own. Standing against the onslaught of evildoers is, the president said, quoting Blair, “Our determination to defend our values and our way of life…. We will not yield. We will defend our freedom.” On how to defend “our freedom,” Mr. Bush was less coy than Blair, saying the thinking he would “impose on others” was the forced “spread of democracy … [which] will make the world more peaceful and America more secure.”9 The president adroitly refrained from saying he had launched America on a course mirroring that of his lamentable mentor Woodrow Wilson, one that would teach Muslims to elect good men via persuasive schooling by U.S. military forces.
Rallying to Blair and Bush were America’s abyss-bound, Iraq-war-loving band of neoconservative pundits, with Victor Davis Hanson and Charles Krauthammer in the van of the pack. Mr. Hanson is among the foremost purveyors of the Big Lie that denies legitimacy—real or perceived—to the Islamists’ statements regarding their motivation for fighting the United States and the West. “They are fighting us,” Mr. Hanson asserted in the Washington Times, because of “the blind hatred instilled by militant Islam…. Americans and others in the West should not be surprised at the Islamists’ determination to wage an all-out war because of who we are rather than what we do.”10 Joining Hanson’s paean of praise to willful, suicidal neocon blindness, Mr. Krauthammer attributes the Islamists’ motivation to “a sickness incubated within Arab/Islamic culture, a toxic combination of repression, corruption, intolerance, and fanaticism, fed by tyrannical governments eager to deflect popular anger from themselves onto the American infidel. [Note: Mr. Krauthammer here is referring to the police-state regimes coddled, funded, and protected by the United States and its allies for more than thirty years.]”11
In essence, Mssrs. Blair, Bush, Hanson, Krauthammer, and their like are telling Americans not to think for themselves. They claim to have the answer and to know the Muslim mind better than any Muslim. They also know their version of history is right, Islamic history is irrelevant, and America can set the world right by militarily smashing every Muslim political system or group that either does not accept a U.S.-style secular, capitalist democracy or threatens Israel. The later, oddly, always seems far more important to neoconservatives than protecting Americans and their interests. Finally, they also limit the extent of domestic debate by damning those who disagree with them about U.S. foreign policy as either—and Mssrs. Hanson and Krauthammer are masters of this nonpunishable form of hate speech—anti-Semites or America haters. Scor
e a hat trick for bin Laden.
And this leads us back to where we started, to the insights of Abraham Lincoln. The only attribute I share with Mr. Lincoln is that I write this, as he wrote the passage quoted above, at the age of fifty-two years. And I must tell you that Lincoln’s claim that the survival of the Union depended on its citizens’ efforts is just as pertinent today as on the eve of civil war. In the past four years, I have learned that in America’s war for survival against the forces bin Laden leads and symbolizes, one person counts for little in attacking the elite, bipartisan chanters of the Big Lie. From President Bush to Senator John Kerry, from Senator John McCain to President Bill Clinton, from the New York Times to the Washington Times, Americans have been indoctrinated with the same mantra: They hate us for what we are, not what we do. Trusting their leaders, Americans cannot see clearly that their country is drifting toward defeat in economic, human, lifestyle, and geopolitical terms.
To paraphrase Lincoln, protecting the Union is both your business and mine. And I am not asking you to accept what I have written as gospel. I do urge you, however, to entertain the possibility that our leaders are wrong—some knowingly so to the point of treason—and then proceed to read the words spoken and written by bin Laden and other Islamists. Reflect on those words, compare them to your leaders’ assertions, and decide for yourselves where the truth lies. I have done so repeatedly for a decade and have concluded the truth lies in the enemy’s mouth when he says the motivation for attacking America comes from a belief that U.S. policy threatens Islam’s survival. This fact makes America’s Islamist enemies infinitely more lethal, patient, and enduring than a foe who is motivated simply by hate for elections, R-rated movies, and gender equality.
The conclusion I urge you to consider is that America’s leaders have for fifteen years and more deliberately underestimated the Islamist theat to the United States. They have spat out the rhetoric of warriors, but given our military and intelligence services rules of engagement that make them targets and allow the enemy to flourish. They have spent hundreds of billions of dollars for security and military force but proved moral cowards in the face of attack, more interested in currying international favor than in acting to protect you and your children. And each time America has been attacked, they have been faster to constrict civil liberties than to destroy the enemy. They have loudly called the enemy “gangster,” “criminal,” and “lunatic fringe” to avoid the politically incorrect and costly necessity of telling voters that Muslims deem U.S. foreign policy a threat to Islam, and that the Americans who died in East Africa, Aden, New York, Washington, Afghanistan, and Iraq are a mere down payment on the total human cost we will ultimately endure. Our leaders consistently have lied about, failed to preempt when the chance came, and appeased the enemy. They cannot be counted on to change for the better, or even for the truer.
And so it is up to us—you and I—to think for ourselves and decide how best to defend America. The elites in both parties have not done so, and will not do so unless and until we force them to act in our country’s defense. “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present,” Lincoln told the Congress in December 1862. “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” I urge you, my fellow citizens, to heed Mr. Lincoln’s advice; as he said, we “hold the power, and bear the responsibility.” Destroy the thrall under which you are deceived by the tellers of the Big Lie. Read the plentiful and easily accessible evidence, think for yourselves, form an accurate understanding of the enemy, and then act to prevent our country’s defeat, a defeat which would mean today what it would have meant in 1862, that we have been content to “meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”12
Appendix: “We Are Not Ashamed of Our Jihad”: Bin Laden’s Growth as an Islamic Leader and Hero After 1996
He was a fighter and a purifier such as was long overdue. We had felt in our hearts to expect one such as he; it had somehow been foretold.
Franklin Sanborn on John Brown, 1859
Yet I have a commandment to resist sin, to overcome evil, to fight the good fight of Faith: And I pray, with whom should I fight this good fight if not with Giant Despair? I will therefore attempt the taking away of his life, and the Demolishing of Doubting-Castle. Then said, he, who will go with me.
The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678
I love the man who can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm and whose conscience approves his conduct will pursue his principles unto death.
Thomas Paine, December 1776
Osama bin Laden. Is he a devout Muslim, murderous nut cake, avenging messiah, media celebrity, heroic warrior, gullible rich-man’s son, religious fakir, evolving political leader, or a megalomaniac “who wants to take over the world,” as President Husni Mubarak once described him?
The West has pretty much decided that bin Laden is a serious threat, but only because he is a trigger-happy nut, psychopath, or violence-prone youngster who never grew up. Frank Smyth and Jason Vest have written in Newsday that bin Laden is “neither a mainstream Muslim nor a paragon of sanity” and quoted a U.S. government psychologist’s assessment that bin Laden is a “malignant narcissist” who views people as objects to be killed or protected.1 In the same article, Sam Husseini, former spokesman of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee said bin Laden is “definitely a fringe character.”2 A former senior U.S. counterterrorism official has said bin Laden is “a symbol where you get to rebel against your parents and make a statement, but it hasn’t translated yet into people being willing to take up arms … and incur the possible threat of retaliation.”3 The same former official has said bin Laden is “not a very effective leader, he’s not a very effective organizer. He certainly has the passion, but he hasn’t the ability to rally and mobilize and really create a movement that becomes, if you will, a trans-Islamic political movement.”4 And academe has chimed in with its judgment that bin Laden’s “tactical alliances with other ‘like-minded’ mainstream, as well as radical Islamic groups … may have more to do with Bin Ladin’s generous financial contributions than with anything else.”5
In addition to these facile judgments, others have atypically emanated from usually excellent, insightful writers. These individuals inexplicably lose their objectivity and pontificate about those not intelligent enough to acknowledge the universal applicability of the West’s secular values. The superb and courageous Australian journalist Richard Mackenzie—who, with Edward Jiradet, may have been the best Western journalists covering the Afghan jihad—fell prey to this trap twice in a short article in The New Republic.6 “Islamic fundamentalism,” Mackenzie writes, “represents a minority that would impose religious doctrine from an earlier historical era.” Then, he claims, “the vast majority of Muslims worldwide do not support violence. They deserve leaders who will unequivocally condemn the extremist wing of militant Islamic theology.”7 One wonders how Mackenzie gained access to the collected views of “the vast majority of Muslims worldwide.”
Paul Fregosi, Simon Reeve, and Peter Bergen echo Mackenzie’s mantra. In his book Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries, Fregosi asserts, without describing the basis of his judgment, that “[m]any modern-day Muslims condemn this new fanatical Jihad even more strongly then to Westerners. The Jihad of today is for them a political Jihad with no connection to the religious Jihads of the past. They do not recognize themselves in this new Jihad, nor the preachings of their Prophet.” Following suit are Simon Reeve who, in his fine book The New Jackals, maintains “[t]here are more than one billion followers of the Prophet Muhammad on the planet, and the vast majority want global harmony and reconciliation between different religious groups,” and the outstanding journalist Peter Bergen, who told CNN in May 2001 tha
t “in the end, you know, 99.9 percent of Muslims reject the kind of violence … that he’s [bin Laden] proposing.”8
The question that arises is why such demonstrably courageous and thoughtful men would make categorical statements based on largely unscientific data and without taking seriously bin Laden’s words? Reading elsewhere in Mackenzie’s article, however, it becomes clear that his calculations—and those of Fregosi, Reeve, Bergen, and others—are solidly based on the well-honed tradition of Western arrogance and assumed intellectual superiority, one that has become, I think, so deeply engrained in Western consciousness that it is the lens through which we see all other cultures and with which we try to explain what we deem their shortcomings and failures. “Yet unlike Christianity and Judaism,” Mackenzie explains, “Islam has yet to undergo a reformation of enlightenment—and that allows some clerics to claim religious justification for violence.”9 In short, Muslims have not followed the globally suitable and ultimately inevitable secular model for societal development laid down by the West: Ignore your faith and history, follow our lead, and you will be fine; that is, just like us. This notwithstanding the fact our reformation brought a hundred years of devastating religious war, and the enlightenment fueled the horrors of the French and Bolshevik revolutions. This position also begs important questions: Could bin Laden be the catalyzing agent of an incipient Islamic reformation? Could the monarchical and dictatorial police states of the Islamic world be prompting bin Laden’s actions, just as the absolute monarchy called the Roman Catholic Church spurred the Lutherite reformers of our Reformation? Could U.S. and Western economic, political, and military support for those police states be preventing some form of Islamic reformation?
Through Our Enemies' Eyes Page 43