Jul. 24, 2005 4:35 | Updated Jul. 24, 2005 5:26 The terror epidemic
We, the nations of the world, are in a strange war. It is strange because its outcome hinges primarily on whether the side being attacked will admit that war has been declared against it and decides to fight back.
The 9/11 attacks were the culmination of years of Western denial, despite devastating attacks over many years directed at Americans and others. If the pre-9/11 level of denial was, in retrospect, surprising, the post-9/11 refusal to recognize the war that we are in is even more striking.
How many "9/11s" does the world have to experience before we get it? A seemingly offhand sentence in The New York Times news report of the horrific bombings in Sharm e-Sheikh yesterday, killing over 80 people, perhaps inadvertently illustrates how widely the current conflict is misunderstood.
"The bombings provided a gruesome coda to a week in which suicide bombers had threatened cities from Iraq to Britain to Egypt, lending to the impression of a rising tide of terror spilling from the conflicts of the region." [emphasis added].
Yes, the terror epidemic seems to have returned.
But in reality, it never left. And it is not spillover from "conflicts in the region" but from the refusal to systematically address a particularly potent epidemic: of the symbiotic/parasitic relationship between militant Islam and the dictatorships of the Muslim world.
It goes without saying that not all Muslims support terrorism, but it is equally understood that all of the terrorists carrying out these "9/11s" are Islamists. And though some or all of the London bombers seemed to have been raised in Britain, the al-Qaida ideology they followed was incubated in places like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Egypt.
This incubation process had almost nothing to do with "conflicts in the region" and everything to do with the combination of failure and oppression that has plagued the Muslim Middle East. The terrorists are out to make the world safe for Islamist theocracies on the model of Afghanistan under the Taliban and Iran today, pure and simple.
Israel, of course, provides a useful decoy, though Osama bin Laden rarely even bothered to pretend that his attacks had much to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict.
That this is not really about Israel is demonstrated by the simple realization that if Israel were to magically disappear tomorrow, the Islamist war drums would only beat louder. Israel may be somewhere on the war path, but that path leads through Cairo and Riyadh as much as it does to London and Madrid and, of course, New York and Washington.
Which brings us to the at once banal and as yet widely unlearned conclusion: the world is in this together. The militant Islamists cannot be appeased, they must be destroyed, and to do that they must be deprived of support, breeding grounds and sanctuary. No Arab or European country is safe from them.
For years, Egypt tried ruthlessly crushing its militant Islamists, while the US treated their rise as a policing, not a global structural problem. Neither strategy worked.
Now the US has taken on the lonely (to the shame of France and Germany) task of pursuing a different strategy. The new approach is built on the realization that Islamist terror can only be defeated by tackling both its sanctuaries and incubators.
The former, regimes like those removed from Kabul and Baghdad and in place in Teheran and Damascus, need to be driven either out of power or out of the terror business. The latter, such as the dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, need to be told they must stop paying off the terrorists by allowing and even encouraging anti-American and anti-Israeli indoctrination to flourish on their soil. These countries continue to use hatred of the West as the escape valve for opponents of their own corrupt and oppressive systems; this too must stop.
We must spread what the terrorists fear most and seek to destroy: freedom and democracy. There is a legitimate debate over how to do this smartly, so that the Islamists cannot exploit democracy's own mechanisms to thwart it. There should not, however, have to be more 9/11s before we can accept that it is no coincidence that a sea of dictatorships has become a sea of terrorism, and that it is the nature of this sea that must be addressed.
