Running from Iraq
GERECHT, REUEL MARC
Running from Iraq Don't imagine it will reduce the jihadist threat By Reuel Marc Gerecht Is jihadism growing exponentially because of Iraq? The liberal parts of the press, Democratic politicians,...
...This is unlikely in Iraq...
...Leaving Iraq will not make our world better...
...threats to withdraw unless the Iraqis do a better job of forming a national-unity government and constraining their violent passions solicits from the Iraqis just the opposite of what is intended...
...The nationalist aspirations of the Shiite Iraqis are real and raw (and a war with the Sunnis would make them worse...
...Were they right...
...Sunni participation in the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite, also will probably end with a serious counterinsurgency effort...
...The Iraq war, as the critics see it, overwhelms the American attack on the Taliban and bin Laden, the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan, bin Laden's survivor charisma, the Pakistani madrassa machine, General Pervez Musharraf's retreat from Waziristan, the Saudi Wahhabi multitenta-cled missionary-money machine—still the most influential conveyer of anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian hatred in the world—the existence of Israel, the Israeli retreat from Lebanon in 2000, Palestinian suicide bombings, the resurgence of Hezbollah, the triumph of American pop culture in Muslim lands, the Satanic Verses, Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, the Western assault on traditional sexual ethics and the God-ordained male domination of the Muslim home, the constant, positivist legal assault on the Holy Law, American and European support for Muslim dictatorships, the Western-centered, Western-aping, increasingly brutal Muslim regimes that have transgressed against God ever since Napoleon routed the mameluks outside Alexandria in 1798, and the unbearable Western military supremacy that reversed a millennium of nearly uninterrupted Muslim triumphs...
...Will we do so forever...
...The NIE, or at least the "Key Judgments" summary that the president declassified and released, didn't in fact say that the war in Iraq had made us less safe, or that Iraq Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard...
...The West smashes this fundamental relationship, sanctioned by God, through inseminating the virus of egalitarianism, hedonism, and sexual perversion...
...On the other hand, some helpful countervailing forces to the Sunni-Shiite explosion might come into play after an American retreat...
...The Shiite charismatic view of history, where the Caliph Ali and his descendants, the imams, are indispensable intermediaries between God and man, is anathema to most Sunnis...
...The Iranian appeal will be to target America...
...Much of what the United States needs to do will outrage them...
...In Vietnam, the South Vietnamese government deployed a tolerably competent military force that held for a "decent interval" after our departure...
...Let us be absolutely clear: The war and its most tangible result—the empowerment of the Iraqi Shia and Kurds—have galvanized a Sunni jihadist cause in Mesopotamia...
...We should expect a few Iraqi governments to collapse before we start seeing real progress...
...Osama bin Laden has always claimed that he and his followers are the "strong horse" and that the United States is a "weak horse," unable to sustain a long war against the faithful...
...They certainly won't be able to do so if they know the Americans are leaving...
...And as faithful Muslims decide how much of Western political thought to incorporate into their own, anti-Americanism will skyrocket...
...Iraq may be going to hell in a hand basket, but it is an enormously dubious proposition that the powerless of the Middle East think better of their dictators because of the turmoil there...
...Point: Islamic militants loathe Israel, which they view as a Jewish-Western colonial state occupying land vouchsafed to Muslims by God...
...This may be too much for the United States now...
...All of this is downgraded before Iraq...
...Try to recall an image of the mujahedeen winning in Afghanistan in 1989...
...Your average Muslim fundamentalist, who has no intention of becoming a holy warrior, fears and hates, and admires and envies, America...
...They were its historic custodians, and often met within its confines, to talk politics and drink tea, before the men of violence blew it up...
...But it could well make the Shia, no longer restrained by the moderate clerics of Najaf, go on the warpath...
...The vast majority of Muslims in the Middle East certainly would have applauded...
...For example, the United Sates will continue to work with the security and intelligence services of many Middle Eastern autocracies...
...If abandoning Iraq would reduce the terrorist threat to the United States and leave the Middle East in better shape, then that course would be compelling...
...Over and over and over again...
...How about Karen Hughes today...
...If we leave, it will, in all probability, get vastly worse...
...And a side note: Once a radicalized Shiite community conquered central and western Iraq, it very well might turn on the Kurds...
...We—not the Iraqis—need to lead a major effort to break the Sunni insurgency...
...The liberal parts of the press, Democratic politicians, and numerous counterterrorist experts say as much...
...Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons, and other nefarious acts have supposedly given the United States a bad name among Muslims—as if we hadn't already squandered our credibility by failing to be a "fair and honest broker" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...
...They cite the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) "Trends in Global Terrorism," completed in April 2006 but recently leaked in snippets, which they claim concluded that we are losing the fight against Islamic extremism because the war in Iraq is producing ever-expanding waves of holy warriors...
...The Iraqi Sunnis won't...
...embassies in Africa, the USS Cole, 9/11, the continual bombing of Iraq under the Clinton administration, the economic sanctions against Saddam's regime that Muslims saw as choking the Iraqi people...
...And it has made the Islamic world's entry into modernity emotionally agonizing...
...And for those who are concerned about the geostrategic stability of the Middle East or the growth of Sunni jihadism and terrorism against the United States, staying in Iraq ought to be a compelling choice...
...Asian Buddhists, Confucians, and Shintoists gaining power...
...And what has been going on in Pakistan for decades has almost nothing to do with Iraq...
...The Iraq-centered critics turn the wisdom of Qutb on its head, by looking for the sources of Muslim anger in American actions, principally in Iraq...
...The Sunni elders of Samarra actually cherished the Shiite Golden Shrine...
...He helped devise the ethics that in just two generations would allow young Muslim men to slaughter women in Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Madrid, London, and New York...
...Neither the authors of the NIE on jihad nor the Democratic critics of the war apparently foresee this menace...
...A forceful U.S...
...A new battle between Sunnis and Shiites would spur missionary activity, perhaps on a scale not seen since the 1980s...
...According to the Holy Law, which [Muslim militants] interpret literally, refusing any evolution as a degradation of the faith's sovereignty, women ought to dedicate themselves to the family and the home while men remain masters of all that transpires in the public realm...
...Who knows what that would do to Iraq's neighbors...
...Foreign holy warriors who hook up with exBaathists in Iraq will probably go home more dangerous than when they arrived—especially, as the NIE warned, if they go home victorious...
...We're beyond that now...
...Imagine how they would act if somebody tried to take down the city of Ramadi, the heart of Sunni rejection-ism and power...
...If the Shiites are forced to conquer the Sunni triangle, which they probably will be, Sunni Arabs will blame the United States, perhaps with a new level of ferocity...
...But every man, woman, and child in the Muslim world will be flooded with vivid, lasting images of America's flight from Iraq...
...The liberation of women is thus in the same domain [for Islamic militants] as homosexuality and HIV Yet should we back down from advocating equality between men and women in Islamic countries because such advocacy makes some Muslims more inclined to convert civilian jetliners into fuel bombs...
...Is Iraq jet fuel for the anti-American hatred of jihadists...
...You can't—there were few photographs of that distant war...
...Many jihad-rising critics and former counterter-rorist officials in the Clinton administration argue that we need to avoid behavior that inflames anti-American Muslim passions...
...Even if we ramp up our criticism of these regimes— and we should—and start to distance ourselves from them and condition our aid, we will still be condemned by many in the region for advocating democracy but supporting dictatorship...
...Foreign aid would prolong the conflagration in Iraq...
...Nor are we going to stop supporting Israel or opposing terrorist organizations that are also popular social movements (Hamas and Hezbollah), or speaking in favor of women's equality and artistic freedom, or supporting our European allies who may (unwisely) decide to ban headscarves and other traditional Muslim practices within their countries...
...This contest is not what the Bush administration foresaw when it espoused democracy in the Middle East as part of the solution to the evil that struck us on 9/11...
...Perverse as it is, the carnage in Mesopotamia, like the slaughter in Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s, has forced some reflection among Muslims about their faith and the hideous abuse it has suffered at the hands of some believers...
...And if so, does that mean the United States should refrain from pushing policies that infuriate extremists across the Islamic world...
...Al Qaeda spokesmen regularly declare that Iraq is at the center of their global effort to humble the United States, the great violator of Islamic lands and virtue...
...Was Madeleine Albright wrong to talk about such things incessantly...
...The introspection, debates, and fall from grace will be painful and quite possibly violent, as devout Muslims who incorporate the community's popular will into God's law fight it out with fundamentalists who view man-made legislation as an insult to Allah...
...Virginia's Republican senator John Warner, a faithful "stay-the-course" kind of guy, is showing signs of battle fatigue...
...Should we just have let Saddam go free (he was almost there in 2000...
...Such men and women are probably near a majority of all Muslims in every Arab land...
...In the hands of the Iraq-centered critics, too, a century-long history of ideas drops by the way...
...We should believe them—although their preferred battleground would still be America if they could figure out a way to put jihadist cells onto our soil...
...He referred to the Israelis as Nazis...
...Also, we do not find the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, progenitor of modern Sunni fundamentalism, and its offshoots throwing their weight into this war...
...While it is surely true that jihadism is alive and well, and that the Iraq war has a role in its continued vibrancy, the insistence on a causal connection obscures a host of lasting factors that would powerfully fuel America-hatred whether or not the United States had gone back to Iraq...
...Throughout much of the Islamic world, fundamentalism is now mainstream thought...
...But holding power will deprive militants of the luxury of mere opposition...
...The truth is that much of what the United States needs to do to win the war on Islamic extremism will naturally infuriate those who view the United States and American culture as threatening to Islam, all the more because they also find it appealing...
...Fundamentalists will enter the public conversation even more loudly than they have already...
...Unfortunately, the CIA is incapable of truly judging the value of such dealings since its bureaucratic interests are best served by inflating these "secret" relationships...
...Fewer and fewer among the nation's political and intellectual elites believe that "staying the course" in Iraq advances the war against terrorism and our national interests in the Middle East...
...Muslims' questioning of their own world has gained steam since 9/11...
...This process is starting in the Palestinian lands...
...The more serious the debates, the more furious the flailing out against America by the hard-core militant Muslims will be...
...And it is equally unlikely that a Shiite-dominated army will be able to restrain its own kith and kin in the Shiite militias, at least while the Sunni insurgency thrives...
...By this reasoning, who knows how many Muslim militants would have refrained from the leap into the all-consuming hatred of jihad...
...Islamic fundamentalism is much stronger today than when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979...
...forces out of Iraq...
...What's more, if the Middle East evolves democrati-cally—and the democratic conversation, amplified by the deposing of Saddam Hussein, remains vibrant—anti-Americanism will shoot through the roof...
...To these critics, the Iraq war somehow is uglier than the whole cosmological affront of the modern world: Western Christians, Jews, and atheists on top...
...It is worth recalling the explosion of Islamic radicalism that followed the Iranian revolution in 1979: The Saudis and Iranians went head to head in supporting their preferred Muslim radicals, a competition the Saudis decisively won, with Osama bin Laden a major beneficiary...
...Although there are many Sunnis serving in the new Iraqi army, their service to the country probably won't withstand the tough counterinsurgency that will be required to calm the Sunni triangle...
...the Hindu pantheists rising...
...Neither this magazine nor CIA and State Department analysts foresaw either the amplitude of this sentiment or the spread of fundamentalism among the Sunni community, widely deemed the bedrock of secularism inside Iraq...
...Once upon a time, the Iraqi army had a strong identity, which it often forced upon the rest of the nation, but that identity was inextricably connected to the Sunni governing class...
...Qutb knew that Israel's victories over the Arabs were just a symptom of a deeper Muslim weakness...
...It raises legitimate questions...
...The critics should at least try to make the argument that the hell we have now is worse than the whirlwind we will reap after we run...
...And we can rest assured that they will make us pay...
...And Egypt's Islamic activists themselves perhaps have looked into the moral abyss of holy war more acutely than most others because they witnessed the barbarism of some of their own militants in the past...
...Will Washington defend the Kurds again...
...Our holy-warrior and our more mundane enemies will know it...
...And that Shiite-Sunni collision could powerfully stoke the anti-American flames...
...And neighbors will not stand idly by...
...But would administration critics want to walk away from the peace process because such negotiations infuriate radical Muslims, making their transformation into lethal anti-American holy warriors more likely...
...The Sunni will to power is a ferocious thing...
...For them, a successful counterterrorist foreign policy ought to improve our image among Muslims...
...We will deal with these distasteful regimes, and their subjects will understandably despise us for it...
...The very liberal Mustafa Hamarneh, director of the University of Jordan's Center for Strategic Studies, who has welcomed Israelis to Amman, jumped for joy when the Israelis bogged down in Lebanon...
...They know Ayman al-Zawahiri firsthand...
...Under representative government, Muslims will have a harder time avoiding the rot—the ethics that allow young men to kill so easily...
...This could change if the Americans left and a vicious Shiite conquest of Iraq began...
...It's reasonable to assume that the conflict has helped anti-American Sunni jihadists multiply their numbers...
...It would be wrong to call this widespread, but it is a start...
...All the expert discussion about Islamic terrorism now being the domain of "nonstate" actors will die a quick death at our expense...
...It certainly appears to be too much for the Democrats...
...As the Israeli scholar Reuven Paz has noted, Egypt's dictator, Hosni Mubarak, may not want militants going to Iraq, as he once allowed them to go to Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya...
...We will be a defeated nation...
...In power and out, fundamentalists and more moderate Muslims will focus more seriously on Islamic political thought and practice...
...If the United States gets driven from Iraq, the soul-searching necessary to combat Islamic extremism will also suffer a rout...
...The complexity of this picture suggests, among other things, how shallow the discussion has been among those who see our mistakes in Iraq as the epicenter of our terrorist problem...
...Should we chastise our artists and writers—and Muslim artists and writers who've come to the West for its freedom—if they transgress the proprieties of faithful Muslims, especially radical Muslims who require only a little more psychological TNT to send them over the edge into anti-American holy war...
...We would have all been better off if President Bush and his team had done what Senator John McCain advised back in 2004, when the insurgency started to rip: Tell everyone that the war would be long and hard, and pour in more troops...
...A major American humiliation in Iraq would probably produce what the jihad-rising crowd think Iraq is already: an extraordinary stimulus to holy-warrior passion—Beirut, Mogadishu, the embassy bombings, the Cole, and 9/11 all rolled into one...
...Before March 2003, much of the counterterrorist community had already decided that an American-led war in Iraq would harm the West's counterterrorist efforts...
...The president's Republican base is cracking on Iraq...
...When Saddam's Baathist totalitarianism spiritually ceased to exist, in its place, religious identities gained ground...
...Almost everything the United States does in this world ought to annoy these people...
...It is arguable that Pakistan—not mentioned in the NIE's "Key Judgments"—has now replaced Saudi Arabia and Egypt as the intellectual breeding ground of jihadism...
...Iraq, moreover, like Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War, has provided a place where jihadists from different lands can meet, become blood brothers, and acquire deadly skills...
...Instead, we should follow the road map offered in these pages by the military historian Frederick W. Kagan...
...When Hezbollah appeared victorious over the Israelis this summer, even moderate and liberal Arab Muslims began to rethink their accommodationist stance toward the Jewish state...
...In the eyes of many Sunnis in Iraq and elsewhere, the Iraqi Shia already carry the burden of being liberated by the Americans...
...If the Kurds decided that the Arabs had again run amok, they might risk declaring independence...
...That's about all one can say for sure about the effects of Iraq on the global jihadist movement...
...There are very few mundane things that anger militant Muslims more than the "peace process," the attempt by the Americans and the Europeans to once again seduce Muslim rulers into actions betraying God, his Holy Law, and his people...
...European and Pakistani holy warriors no doubt cite Iraq as one of America's sins, but beneath these declarations lie volcanoes rumbling from pressures much closer to home...
...That's not a good bet, especially if we start pulling out...
...To bin Laden and those who've embraced his cause, American defeats have been much more inspiring than American victories...
...And the war has certainly provided riveting imagery and stories for Sunni holy warriors globally...
...His followers, like many less violent members of the Muslim Brotherhood, did not rise in indignation when the Israelis annihilated Gamal Abdel Nasser's armies in 1967...
...Bill Clinton came very close to embracing artistic self-censorship, as did Jacques Chirac, over the Danish cartoon incident...
...By this reasoning, we will always be playing defense to their offense and possibly violent umbrage...
...Indeed, rising anti-Americanism will be a pretty good barometer of how serious the democratic-religious debates are in the Muslim Middle East...
...For these reasons and more, anti-Americanism is going to remain high...
...Egypt's Brotherhood, like its offshoots, has been a bit reluctant to embrace the global jihad of the truly hard-core...
...The Salafis and Wah-habi fundamentalists loathe the Shiites, whom they view as mushrikun, those who ascribe partners to God...
...When Islamic activists become more responsible for governance, the fundamentalist civil wars will begin...
...Discussion of what will happen if the United States pulls out of Iraq has been similarly thin...
...An American departure, be it rapid or gradual, anytime in the next few years would further stampede Iraqis to retreat to the security of their ethnic and religious communities...
...presence in Iraq was always the key to ensuring that Iraq's national identity had a chance to congeal peacefully—that the Sunni will to power was contained, that Shiite fear and loathing of the Baathists and Sunni fundamentalists didn't ignite into all-consuming revenge, destroying the Shiite center led by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and that Kurdish separatism didn't flare...
...It doesn't help that the Kurdish Sunnis have oppressed the small Kurdish Shiite community...
...In these critics' distorted perspective, the singular provocation of the Iraq war trumps all the other well-known spurs to jihadist fury: the American flight from Beirut after the bombings in 1983, the American flight from Somalia after "Black Hawk down," the attack on the U.S...
...Maybe one of the 9/11 bombers wouldn't have flipped if we'd stopped bombing and sanctioning Iraq, and the Twin Towers would still be standing...
...Many of Bush's harshest critics now begin every counter-terrorist discussion with polls of the Muslim world...
...As crude as these numbers are, they still tell us something about the magnetism of Iraq and today's fundamentalist commitment to holy war...
...The Iraqi Sunni community has no grand ayatollahs and clerical structure of the Shiite kind to moderate and block its violent young men...
...It's the best plan out there for winning...
...Nevertheless, a consensus is growing in Washington...
...Conservative writers like George Will and William F. Buckley long ago gave up on the idea that the United States could help build a democratic government in Iraq...
...We need to keep building up a Shiite-dominated Iraqi army and slowly deploying it in ways that it can handle—with integral American involvement, as at Tal Afar...
...Unless one believes that the regimes in place can kill off Islamic militancy and squash Islamic organizations that have terrorist movements within them, then the only solution to bin Ladenism is for Sunni fundamentalism itself to kill it off...
...Then again, perhaps such a cessation would have whetted the appetite of the same militants...
...But the rough estimates were that 25,000 to 75,000 holy warriors came to Pakistan from 1980 to 1989...
...Just remember how the Sunni elite acted when American forces reduced Falluja: Many went into open rebellion...
...But even if Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Pakistan contribute little to our well-being, in an age of mass-casualty terrorism, a bit of information at the right moment could matter enormously...
...There isn't really much difference between left and right: While Democrats Howard Dean, John Kerry, and John Murtha all wish for a rapid departure, former Republican Secretary of State James Baker will soon release his centrist "alternative," reportedly announcing that victory is impossible and our best bet amounts to "cut, pause, talk to the neighbors, and run...
...The Franco-Iranian scholar Farhad Khosrokhavar (who recently published a fascinating study of members of al Qaeda in French prisons) summed it up nicely when he wrote: In removing the veil from Muslim women and in extolling a legal equality [between the sexes], which contravenes the laws of God and destroys the integrity of the family and its equitable sharing of duties between men and women, the West attempts to pervert the female race...
...But we're not beyond checking the worst tendencies within Iraqi society...
...One thing is highly probable: If the Americans flee, and the Shiites begin a vengeful conquest of the country, Tehran, which is already making a play to lead the radical Muslim world, will reach out globally to Sunni holy warriors to divert attention from the Iraqi Shiite counterattack against Iraqi Sunnis...
...Of course, we might be lucky...
...Iraq ought to be flooded with tens of thousands of die-hard militants, wreaking vastly greater havoc over much larger regions...
...Like the great medieval, hard-line jurist Ibn Taymiyya, who rose in anger at Muslims' aping and tolerating Mongol ways, Qutb declared war not against "Western imperialism" but against the Muslim infatuation with the West...
...We don't need to "stay the course" that Rumsfeld and Abizaid have designed...
...Under Bush, these critics say, American foreign policy has become harsh and insensitive to Muslim feelings...
...In their eyes, the Iraq war has somehow ruptured the radical Muslim psyche in ways that earlier events and preexisting factors did not...
...We—not the Iraqis—must police the Shiite-dominated security services to ensure they don't slaughter the Sunnis, especially as we and a Shiite-dominated army with an important Kurdish contingent make a more serious effort to control Baghdad, Ramadi, and the centers of Sunni resistance...
...Yet the jihadist commitment to Afghanistan was greater than that seen today in Mesopotamia, the second most sacred land for historically sensitive Muslims...
...Yet if the Shiites save us from the last-GI-out-of-Bagh-dad jihad recruitment videos by subduing the Sunni insurgency while we're still in Iraq, it will doubtless be by slaughtering all the bomb-happy Sunnis they can get their hands on...
...And U.S...
...Figures for the Soviet-Afghan war are unreliable—they all come from Pakistani military intelligence...
...But the summary certainly implied that things aren't good and that Iraq has become a rallying cry among Sunni holy warriors...
...The historian Bernard Lewis is right: The West's gradual liberation of women in their domestic and social roles is one of the principal factors behind the West's modern preeminence...
...An overt and proud Shiite conquest of Iraq—which is probably inevitable if the Americans leave—would spook the Saudis, who would probably aggressively back their Wahhabi establishment's holy war against the Shia, supplying money and weapons to Iraq's Sunni Arabs...
...The Iraqi Shiites could conceivably save us from seeing the jihadists triumph in Iraq...
...Holy warriors in Iraq might learn something from Baathists turned Sunni supremacists...
...What would be the likely strategic ramifications in the Middle East of a "redeployment" of U.S...
...Can one ever compromise with Nazis...
...and the Muslims, Allah's chosen people, descending...
...Assuming the Shiites don't conquer the Sunni triangle, the Sunni community by itself will not spare us the sight of triumphant jihadists taking over American bases and planting their flags for all to see, courtesy of Al Jazeera's satellite coverage...
...If we withdraw from Iraq, expect Muslim liberals and moderates to once again nose-dive throughout the Middle East...
...The Sunni elite of Samarra, for example—probably the most bourgeois town in Sunni Iraq—tried but failed to hold out against the radical Sunni supremacists, fundamentalists, and jihadists...
...Ditto for advocating women's rights among Muslims...
...Saddam Hussein's Iraq trained many men to kill efficiently and savagely...
...Yet Arab and Pentagon reports from Iraq suggest that only a few thousand foreign jihadists have entered...
...There are other reasons the American plans for a "political solution" to the insurgency and sectarian strife have been unsuccessful, but the Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish divisions alone are sufficient to render null the "Iraqifica-tion" dreams of Republicans, Democrats, and General Abizaid...
...Intellectually honest, and unquestionably voicing publicly what many moderates were thinking privately, Hamarneh wondered why Arabs should seek peace with Israel if in fact the Zionists were beatable on the battlefield...
...The Jordanian and Egyptian Sunni establishments might do this, too, given their fear of a "pro-Iranian" Shiite bloc developing...
...Sayyid Qutb— probably the most influential intellectual force behind modern Sunni holy war, who demanded of his followers that they look inward to fight the internal rot brought on by the meretricious appeal of Western ways—is pushed into the background...
...If we no longer have the stomach for this fight— and it's going to be ugly, with few sterling VIP Iraqis who will make us proud—then we should at least be honest with ourselves...
...More deeply embedded nationalist sentiments may be the cause...
...These events have supposedly tarnished democracy and strengthened dictatorship in the region...
...Whoever thinks Iraq is hell on earth now is suffering from a failure of imagination...
...It also invites the fantasy that our exiting Iraq would leave us better off, when in all likelihood it would fan the flames of jihadism...
...Yet that's not where the administration's critics like to stop...
...Yet the most powerful force in Egypt trying to force democratic practices upon the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak is the Muslim Brotherhood, and there is no evidence the Brotherhood wants democracy less because of American action in Iraq...
...The Saudi fundamentalists, apparently the largest contingent of foreign holy warriors in Iraq, would add one more item to their list of satanic things the United States has done...
...When we start withdrawing, the entire Iraqi governing structure, along with the Iraqi army, will probably fracture along ethnic and religious lines...
...Do the jihad-rising critics want to rewrite history, and stop President Clinton's WMD bombings and sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime, knowing now how bin Laden exploited Muslim solidarity by underscoring this Western aggression...
...And the heretical Shiite Alawite regime in Damascus would likely echo this call, especially since the Syrian Sunni majority is becoming more devout...
...What is striking about the conflict in Iraq is actually how few foreign fundamentalists have joined the fight...
...was necessarily the primary ingredient fueling the "global jihadist movement...
...In addition, the Jordanians would fear a tsunami of Sunni refugees from Iraq, threatening to change the politics and culture of Hashemite Jordan (think radicalization beyond the wildest hopes of Yasser Arafat...
...The odds are very poor that traditional Sunni hierarchies and the nonradical-ized tribes outside of the major urban areas can withstand the Sunni radicals...
...In any case, something is going on here, something perhaps about the Sun-ni-versus-Shiite and Sunni-versus-Sunni strife, that makes one suspect al Qaeda's hopes for a triumphant Iraq campaign may not be requited—not if holy war brings as much discomfort as it brings glory...
...The Bush administration and Muslim Americans, who have shown themselves highly resistant to the holy-warrior call, have so far kept al Qaeda from again fulfilling its dearest dream...
...Yet our presence in Iraq is the key to ensuring that Shiite-led governments don't collapse into a radical hard core...
...This would be an unintended, unpleasant consequence of the war in Iraq—of our mishandled coun-terinsurgency against the Sunnis and inadequate defense of the vanishing moderate Shiite center against ever-more powerful Shiite radicals...
...Their traditional social structure was mortally wounded by Saddam...
...That was condign punishment for an Egyptian leader who'd fallen from the faith...
...It's a good guess that a majority of Republicans in Congress would dearly love to escape from Iraq if they could figure out how to do so without sounding like "cut-and-run" Democrats...
...It is particularly astonishing to see Iraq-centered critics discount the role of Pakistan and "post-Taliban" Afghanistan in fueling jihadism...
...Stay or go, America's fate, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his General John Abizaid have arranged it, depends on the integrity of the Iraqi military...
...We are certainly not beyond the chance that the Iraqis can govern themselves more humanely than they were governed under Saddam Hussein...
...But the president's democratic reflex was correct...
Vol. 12 • October 2006 • No. 6
