The Field of Fight

by Lieutenant General (Ret. ) Michael T. Flynn

  If you have any doubts about the power of words, just look at the campaigns to silence criticism and suppress the truth in enemy countries (both Iran and the Islamic State have banned satellite television, for example), and the amazing mass of lies aimed at us. The jihadis and the secular tyrants know that they must win the ideological war if they are to prevail. For instance, Iranian leaders constantly warn against the dangers of a “velvet revolution”; they know they were very nearly overthrown in the summer of 2009, when millions of Iranians associated with the “Green Movement” filled the streets with more demonstrators than in 1979, when the shah was overthrown.

  I saw this potentially world-changing event from right across the border. At the time this revolution was occurring, I was the senior intelligence officer for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. We were well postured with military forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the people of Iran simply wanted the United States to say we stood with them—they did not want “boots on the ground.”

  Instead, the Green Movement’s leaders reached out to the Obama White House. Some U.S. officials pressed Obama publicly and argued at the Oval Office to back up the movement. Obama’s decision was “let’s give it a few days.” It turns out that the president was invested heavily in secret outreach that year to Khamenei through a channel with Oman. That channel influenced the president’s thinking in staying silent. And in 2012 the U.S. set up direct contact with Iran in Oman.

  The hapless leaders of the Green Movement have been under house arrest since 2009, the movement itself has been decimated, and, as one of them said recently, “a historic opportunity was missed.” In the meantime, the political map of the Middle East has drastically and violently changed. These poor people only wanted our moral support for their cause. It was a severe mistake not to stand up for these freedom-loving Iranians, whose only desires were to gain a sense of liberty, the simple pursuit of a happier, more stable existence, and a chance for a more prosperous life.

  Removing the sickening chokehold of tyranny, dictatorships, and Radical Islamist regimes must be something our nation stands for whenever freedom-loving people around the world need help. If we don’t stand for this, we stand for nothing.

  We have not responded in kind, to put it mildly. Let’s face it: President George H. W. Bush warned against celebrations of the fall of Communism, and President Obama has tiptoed around open criticism of Vladimir Putin’s many aggressive actions. As for our major enemy, Radical Islam, ever since 9/11 our leaders have done everything in their power to silence criticism of anything “Islamic,” to the point where, until recently, virtually nobody in public life or in academic circles dare speak of Islamic terrorists, even when their motivation was utterly explicit. For instance, many will remember the absurd comments coming from the mayor of Philadelphia, Jim Kenney, in early January 2016, after the Radical Islamist Edward Archer shot the incredibly brave and physically courageous police officer Jesse Hartnett eleven times, severely wounding him. Mayor Kenney stated that in no way, shape, or form did the teachings of Islam have anything to do with the shooting of Officer Hartnett. How would he know this? Is he an Islamic scholar? The shooter himself said he was acting in the name of Islam! If political correctness had not gone amok before this, the mayor’s comments certainly made it clear that it now had gone way beyond being irresponsible. Thank goodness that the intellectually honest Philadelphia police commissioner, Richard Ross, called it like it is when he said the shooter took aim to kill Officer Hartnett in the name of Islam. We need more leaders like him.

  Amir Taheri (an Iranian-born author) has neatly encapsulated the ideological challenge for America:

  • No major power in recent history has gone out of its way as has the United States to help, respect, please, and, yes, appease Islam. And, yet, no other nation has been a victim of vilification, demonization, and violence on the part of the Islamists, as has the United States.

  • Criticism of Islam as racist, ethnocentric, or simply vile, [are] all crammed together in the new category, the politically correct crowd, has turned into a new taboo … “Islamophobia.” Is it Islamophobia to question a religion whose Middle East leaders often preach “Death to America” and hatred for Western values?

  • More prevalent than Islamophobia is Islamophilia, as leftists treat Muslims as children whose feathers should not be ruffled. The Islamophilia crowd invites Americans and Europeans to sacrifice part of their own freedom in atonement of largely imaginary sins against Muslims in the colonial and imperialist era.

  • Many Muslims resent the kind of flattery that takes them for idiots at a time that Islam and Muslims badly need to be criticized. The world needs to wake up [emphasis added]. (www.gatestoneinstitute.org/7092/united-states-islam)

  And yet, if ever a deck were stacked in our favor it is this one. We should go after the Radical Islamists with all our energy, using public statements from our top officials, our radio and television broadcasts in their languages, and of course the Internet. As Taheri says, many Muslims—undoubtedly the majority—know they are terribly led, constantly deceived, poorly educated, and used as cannon fodder by the jihadis.

  You don’t have to send thousands of American troops to defeat Radical Islamic regimes. Properly used, this form of ideological and information warfare can probably bring down the Iranian regime, never mind the sadistic and immoral Islamic State. We should have used this approach instead of invading Iraq in 2003, and we should definitely have done everything possible to support the enormously popular 2009 insurrection in Iran.

  The funny thing about the truth is that it fears no questions. The first order of business is to tell the truth about Radical Islamists and their allies, making two fundamental points. First, the Radical Islamists represent a failed civilization. Second, they are at war with us. It is their war of choice, and they are afraid that if their own people are free to choose the winner, they will choose us, as the Iraqis and the Afghans did at certain stages in each of those wars.

  Look at the Muslim world today. It’s a spectacular failure. Can anyone remember the last time a scientist, economist, or mathematician in a Muslim country won a Nobel Prize? It did once happen—a Pakistani physicist who trained in Great Britain. The other Muslim laureate, a chemist, spent the bulk of his career at Caltech in the United States. This marks a significant decline in Islamic culture; as the distinguished scholar Martin Kramer rightly says, “had there been Nobel Prizes in [the year] 1000, they would have gone almost exclusively to Moslems.”

  What went wrong? They banned the search for truth, proclaiming that it had been fully and finally revealed in the Koran. It’s impossible—in fact it’s heretical—to innovate when you are required to believe that all truth is embodied in a seventh-century text. So it’s not all that surprising to find, according to a United Nations study at the end of the last decade, that there were 65 million illiterates in the Arab world (twenty-two countries).

  Moreover, those who could read had a very limited selection. Tiny little Greece prints five times more books translated from English than the entire Arab world, and, incredibly, if you add up all the foreign books translated into Arabic in the millennium—that’s a thousand years—from the late ninth century to the first decade of this century, the total is less than those translated from English to Spanish in just one year in Spain. And this number doesn’t count translations in Latin America. Nor does it count the smattering of books translated from other languages. A full 20 percent of Arabs are illiterate, and many of those who can read have been taught in religious schools, the infamous madrassas, where their learning consists of repetition and memorization of the Koran.

  Not only have Muslim countries kept many of their citizens in a state of ignorance of the basic facts about the modern world, they have isolated half the population—the women—from real participation in the society. This is not just a matter of social practice, by which women are kept from the educational system, forbidden to work in mixe
d environments, forbidden to leave their homes unless accompanied by a close male relative, and subjected to unprecedented levels of sexual violence. Their inferiority is codified in the legal system. In Iran, for example, a woman is defined as being worth half a man. If a pregnant woman carrying a male fetus is killed in an automobile accident, the guilty party is assessed a full penalty for the fetus but only half as much for the mother-to-be.

  There is a direct relationship between the fanaticism of the Islamic radicals and the Iranian regime and the misery they inflict on their people. Take Iran, for example, which is the world’s leading supporter of jihad and one of the most repressive regimes on earth. On paper, Iran should be one of the richest and most successful countries. It is in a prime geopolitical location, it has abundant natural resources, it boasts a well-educated population, centuries of commercial success, and millennia of high culture. Lucky!

  Yet Iran is in ruins. It has undergone an all-time record drop in its birth rate, the corruption of its ruling class is legendary, there are alarming rates of suicide, prostitution, depression, and drug abuse, unemployment is high, and there’s a mounting shortage of freshwater. The primary explanation for this historic failure is that the country’s wealth is overwhelmingly funneled into jihad and into the private accounts of the nation’s rulers and the elitists who continue to steal from the coffers of their people.

  The Iranian people know they are suffering, but the regime does its damnedest to hide the details, and anyone who dares speak, write, or use social media to protest is locked away in the country’s infamous prisons for years on end. Often they are summarily condemned by a “revolutionary court” and executed. Most Iranians detest the regime and the rulers know it. That is, after all, why repression is getting worse all the time. Executions are up by half under the presidency of the “moderate” Hassan Rouhani. If the Radical Islamist tyrants who rule in Tehran believed they were popular, they wouldn’t work so hard to silence their own people.

  Nonetheless, the country bubbles with protests and strikes. Iranian women challenge the strict dress code and demand proper education and decent jobs. There is even substantial opposition to the regime among mullahs and ayatollahs. There are thousands of Shi’ite clergy in prison in the holy city of Qom, and many of these are pious believers who are convinced that when the regime inevitably falls, it will bring down Islam along with it.

  Despite our perverse current refusal to criticize anything Islamic, those seeking freedom in Muslim countries invariably call out to us for support, knowing that American traditions and values and, eventually, American leadership is their only chance to gain liberty. That is why, in the marches and demonstrations in Iran in 2009, the protesters held signs reading “Obama where are you?” It is why the global Muslim Reform Movement asks for Americans to support their campaign against the imposition of head covering for Muslim women (the hijab—misnamed, as hijab refers to any and all covering of the Muslim woman’s body). It is why the various forces combating the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq openly ask for American assistance. From the Kurds to the Free Syrian Army, we, the United States of America, are their hope for salvation.

  What are we waiting for? Delay is dangerous to our cause. The people eventually decide revolutionary wars, and if the Muslim masses can’t get any support from the United States, they will eventually throw in with the jihadis.

  The war against Radical Islamists must begin at home, where we have declined to challenge their doctrines and expose their many failures. As Andy McCarthy, the former prosecutor who led the case against the “blind sheikh” who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, writes:

  Islamic supremacism is not merely the creed of outlier “violent extremists,” but of hundreds of millions of Muslims, the ocean in which jihadists comfortably swim. A commander in chief who does not or will not come to terms with those facts is unfit for his most basic responsibilities. His stubbornness renders him incapable of protecting the nation. (https://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2015/12/22/obamas-denial-of-the-jihads-ideological-roots-gravely-endangers-the-nation; www.rsis.edu.sg/rsis-publication/srp/co15139-demolishing-the-islamic-state-myth-defeating-the-propaganda-of-isis/#.VkkxwL-4mqj)

  We can’t win this war by treating Radical Islamic terrorists as a handful of crazies and dealing with them as a policing issue, any more than we can win the global war solely with military forces. The political and theological underpinnings of their immoral actions have to be demolished. Other countries have recognized this, and are acting accordingly. In Singapore, after two “radicalized youths” were arrested, the government worked with the country’s Muslim community “by resolving to guide Muslim youth to the correct teachings of Islam.”

  The government of Singapore correctly recognized that:

  The community needed to arm itself with a stronger counter narrative to defeat ISIS’ ideology centered on the Islamic State, Caliphate, and emigration. They needed to neutralize the slick propaganda that ISIS is the savior of today’s spiritually dispossessed Muslims who come from non-Muslim lands, live under non-Islamic laws, and are ruled by nonbelievers. (http://news.asiaone.com/news/singapore/isis-threat-has-grown-says-dpm-teo)

  The government’s goal is to get the Muslim community on record that it’s quite all right for pious Muslims to live in a secular state, that there is no basis for the radicals’ insistence that local Muslims either emigrate to an Islamic state or fight for the creation of one in Singapore, and that there is no requirement that Sharia law be imposed.

  Similar efforts are under way in Indonesia, the biggest Muslim country in the world, and half a dozen countries have banned headscarves.

  Another more fundamental and dramatic effort would be a call for a complete reformation of the Islamic religion. This must start inside the Muslim community in order to succeed—but it must start somewhere. This need for a “religious” reformation is more for political purposes than purely religious. Radical Islam is a totalitarian political ideology wrapped in the Islamic religion. Why are so many constitutions within the Muslim world based on Sharia, providing for an Islamic regime as an alternative to secular models of governance? Models such as those we have in the West.

  As I said with regard to Iran, women who are governed by Sharia have far fewer rights than women in the West. Muslim-majority societies, to varying degrees, have Sharia integrated into their laws, and Muslim families govern their family affairs with Sharia. I found in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sharia courts that imposed vicious judicial punishments on those convicted of various Sharia abuses. These punishments included loss of body parts, hanging in public squares, and in some really sick cases, beheading in front of their families.

  With nations such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and other Arab Muslim nations with some form of Sharia at their constitutional foundations, reforming this political ideology is not simply a matter of necessity; it is a vital aspect of changing the behavior of those radicalized by their misinterpretation and flat-out denial of what this ideology does to those who are corrupted by it.

  Finally, a call for religious reformation in the Islamic religion was expressed in an incredibly brave and bold speech by the leader of Egypt, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, on New Year’s Day 2015. President Sisi has been a vocal supporter of a renewed vision of Islam and he is one who should be internationally admired and respected for his intellectual courage in this call for a reformation of the Islamic religion.

  Speaking before Al-Azhar (the scholarly center of Sunni Islam) and the Awqaf Ministry of religious affairs, he made what must be described as the most forceful and impassioned plea by a Muslim world leader to date on the subject of Islamic reformation. Among the many vital points he addressed, he said that the “corpus of [Islamic] texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries” are “antagonizing the entire world”; that it is not “possible that 1.6 billion Muslim people should want to kill
the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live”; and that Egypt (or the Islamic world in its entirety) “is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.”

  Other relevant excerpts from President Sisi’s speech that should drive the rest of the Islamic world (religious and secular) to seriously consider and act on his words:

  I am referring here to the religious clerics. We have to think hard about what we are facing—and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before. It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!

  That thinking—I am not saying “religion” but “thinking”—that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!

  I am saying these words here at Al Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema—Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now. All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mind-set. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.