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."
More to be done. At home, we also have much to do. We are living on borrowed time, as the former Coast Guard chief Stephen Flynn writes in his book America the Vulnerable. There are innumerable soft targets that we have yet to find a way to protect in what is still fundamentally an open society. We have, of course, achieved much already. Many al Qaeda leaders have been killed or captured or are holed up in a cave somewhere in Pakistan. In Iraq, we didn't find the weapons of mass destruction much the world believed were there, and we were woefully unprepared for the postwar insurgencies, but at least there is now an Iraqi government, led by an Iraqi prime minister who appears both strong and independent, ready to put the country on a course for its first free election within just a few months. As Larry Diamond reports in Foreign Affairs, seeds of democracy are already taking root in south central Iraq. But serious challenges remain. Actions to stamp out the extremists are risky and costly--but essential if any kind of orderly society is to emerge. In any event, we must be prepared for attacks either in Iraq or at home, given the terrorists' understanding of their potential political impact on the upcoming presidential election.
We must remember that we did not choose the war on terrorism. It chose us. Nor can we walk away from it. That's precisely why both presidential campaigns and their parties' conventions have been dominated by the issues of leadership in the war on terrorism.
This story appears in the September 13, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.