We can win--and we must
The instant flap in the media and the Democratic campaign when the president said we might never win the war on terrorism shows just how much 9/11 has changed our political dialogue. Americans wake up every day knowing they are threatened by Islamic radicals willing and eager to die in a holy war against "The Great Satan." Our national commitment to defeating them will brook no equivocation.
His campaign aides quickly qualified the president's remark, but it was, in fact, a candid and necessary statement of realism. Even if we captured Osama bin Laden, expunged all his top leadership, and mopped up the sorry remnants of the Taliban, the anti-American virus of al Qaeda would still be active in much of the Muslim world, where scores of terrorist groups believe mass killing is a "religious obligation." There is no quick fix. We have had tactical successes since 9/11, but the number of terrorist attacks increased last year.
The Arab saying that repetition does not diminish the prayer applies to the nightmare facing America. We are still uniquely vulnerable because of the frustratingly amorphous nature of nonstate terrorism and the fearful ease of mass murder by suicidal maniacs willing to die in order to effect carnage. They reflect the dysfunctionality of much of the Arab world, which has proved a breeding ground for dictators, fanaticism, and terrorist networks determined to exploit our civic values by shooting from hospitals, mosques, and ambulances and corrupting the innocent and the ignorant. Suicide murder is the Palestinians' major contribution to our civilization, though as Haim Harari of the Weizmann Institute pointed out, no Muslim preacher has ever blown himself up. Nor has any relative of an influential Islamist. Rather, the suicide killers are mostly outcast women, naive children, and excited young hotheads whose minds are clouded by the promise of delights--mostly sexual and of the next world--while their families reap handsome rewards for murder. The emotional infrastructure for these atrocities arises from the deliberate fabrication of political facts by the Muslim leadership with which we have yet to find a way to cope.
What can we do? Obviously, we must eliminate terrorists wherever we find them, but we must also provide an example of moral leadership and devote resources to transforming education in the Muslim world, replacing the odious madrasahs that are the breeding grounds for hate. These so-called religious schools are often financed by Saudi Arabia, which has halfway awakened to the fatal disease it has incubated, but Shiite Iran remains the greatest threat. It is radically ideological, seeks nuclear weapons, and sponsors Syrian terrorism as well as most of the terrorism in Iraq. If that weren't enough, it also sponsors and arms most of the face cards in terrorism's unholy deck--Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah. Iran, truly, is the problem of the future. So we must promote political democracy whenever we can in the region. Remember what Abu Musab Zarqawi, the ruthless terrorist leader in Iraq, wrote in his memo to al Qaeda? "Democracy is coming. There will be no excuse thereafter for terrorism in Iraq."
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