Win the War? Yes, We Can!
EDITORIAL Win the War? Yes, We Can! Don’t look now, but evidence of progress in the war on terror is just about everywhere. Last week CIA director Michael Hayden noted some U.S....
...Its black fl ag fl ies no more there...
...From President Bush’s policy...
...Fareed Zakaria observed that the number of Islamist attacks worldwide has declined precipitously since 2004...
...The left argues that a “war on terrorism” is futile, that defeat is inevitable, because terrorism is a “tactic,” not an enemy...
...Progress in one battle is often accompanied by setbacks in another...
...USA Today: Attacks in Iraq are “down 70 percent since President Bush ordered a U.S...
...It argued that intervention in Iraq would energize bin Laden’s movement...
...Iran’s proxies in Iraq, Gaza, and Lebanon commit murder in the pursuit of illiberal ends...
...It is that fact, more than any other, that accounts for his movement’s current disarray...
...Al Qaeda in Iraq is on the run...
...It is partly due to Muslim outrage at al Qaeda’s killing of its coreligionists...
...By the time the fi rst reinforcements arrived in Iraq, the Anbaris were already turning against al Qaeda...
...That movement is in shambles...
...Bin Laden declared Iraq the “central front” of his war against the West, and the Sunni insurgency helped Al Qaeda in Iraq gain a foothold there...
...The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright devoted a long essay to Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, onetime mentor to Ayman al Zawahiri, who now criticizes his former prot?g...
...In the New Republic, Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank told the story of Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, author of an open letter attacking bin Laden and violent jihad that has caused shockwaves across the Muslim world...
...troop increase, or ‘surge,’ early last year...
...Wrong...
...It is partly due to Muslim rejection of al Qaeda’s malign interpretation of Islam...
...But a global war has many fronts...
...A disturbing number of European Muslims are sympathetic to the jihadists and are a potential source of fresh recruits...
...Its troubles cannot be separated from U.S...
...It argued military power would be ineffective against the terrorists...
...Signifi cant setbacks for al-Qaeda globally...
...They did not...
...Al Qaeda may be on the brink of defeat, but its leadership maintains a safe haven along Pakistan’s northwest frontier...
...True...
...Bush changed strategy last year, sending reinforcements to Iraq and ordering General Petraeus to secure the country’s population...
...Nonsense...
...For these reasons, Bergen and Cruickshank wrote that “encoded in the DNA of apocalyptic jihadist groups like Al Qaeda are the seeds of their own long-term destruction...
...But such seeds must be sown, watered, and tended...
...Al Qaeda is no longer the attractive “strong horse” of bin Laden’s December 2001 metaphor...
...Then the president denied the jihadists an ally by removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq...
...Meanwhile, the Iranian theocracy moves steadily forward in its quest for nuclear weapons...
...The left’s analysis of jihadism has been proved incorrect at every turn...
...A precipitous withdrawal would provide aid and comfort to al Qaeda...
...Matthew Continetti, for the Editors...
...The Americans helped to almost completely eliminate the group in Anbar...
...Polling shows a widespread decline in support among Muslims for suicide bombing and for bin Laden...
...It has been denied its strategic goal of establishing an Islamic State of Iraq...
...The constant pressure—cutting off the movement’s funding, bringing down the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, hunting down jihadist affi liates in the Philippines and the Horn of Africa, spying on the terrorists’ global communications— put the enemy on the defensive for the fi rst time...
...What once seemed a war between jihadists and the West is now a war between jihadists and Muslims who reject terrorism...
...The left argued Iraq was a lost cause...
...counterterrorism policy...
...How did this happen...
...Near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia...
...The sheikhs of Anbar Province in Iraq lead a national, transsectarian movement preparing for provincial elections by the end of the year...
...President Bush has demonstrated through perseverance and (more often than not) sound policy that the war on terror can be won...
...accomplishments for the Washington Post: “Near strategic defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq...
...It isn’t...
...Read the authors mentioned above, and you would think that al Qaeda’s troubles sprung up overnight...
...Bin Laden is close to losing this fi ght on his central front...
...And right now we’re winning it...
...In Afghanistan, Coalition forces continue to fi ght al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other agents of state failure...
...And a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would erase all of the progress that has been made in the last year and a half...
...After 9/11, the president mobilized all forms of American power against bin Laden and his global jihadist movement...
...The results have been dramatic...
...and Osama bin Laden and suggests they be put on trial...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 37
