Posted on 12/14/2005 7:37:57 AM PST by Valin
Walid Phares concludes Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against America with a passage that could have been excised verbatim from one of President Bush’s post-9/11 speeches. Referring to the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism, Phares declares that “many visionary people in the West and many more brave people in the Muslim world will contribute. This will decide if future jihads end up with mushroom clouds around the world, or if peace, democracy, and freedom mushroom worldwide.” Apocalyptic admonishments like this pervade Future Jihad, a flawed, but nonetheless critical piece of work.
Phares, a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University and Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, studies the Middle East and terrorism from a unique vantage point: he was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon but has lived in the United States since 1990. Having spent his youth in a society where jihad was “part of the dominant culture,” and having studied the movement for twenty-five years, Phares was well-positioned to call attention to the terrorist threat before September 11. But despite the jihadist tactics that had been on full display – from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the Taliban’s rise to power in 1996 to the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 – media, academic and government elites did not heed his warnings.
Instead, the United States and other Western democracies downplayed the severity of the threat posed by al Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalist groups, sometimes responding to their strikes with pinprick counterattacks and sometimes not responding at all. Phares’s explanation for this bewildering affair is the most insightful argument presented in the book. He attributes the events of September 11, and the ignorance and inaction that facilitated them, not to a “failure of imagination” as the 9/11 Commission concluded, but to a failure of education.
Contrary to the teachings of Western academics, jihad is not, and never has been, a peaceful phenomenon. Phares argues that the financial and diplomatic influence of Islamist sympathizers in the United States has fostered an obfuscation of the facts regarding the true nature of jihadist ideology, and that universities across the country, particularly Middle East Studies departments, are complicit in this. Many college textbooks, for example, gloss over the violent, expansionist nature of early Islamic history. And as Phares astutely points out, a misinformed academy leads inevitably to a misinformed media, a misinformed government and a misinformed public.
Accordingly, Phares proceeds to examine the theological and historical roots of jihad, the unofficial sixth pillar of Islam. Understood as “a call for action” by its adherents, jihad, in its original form, could only be sanctioned by the caliph, the legitimate spiritual and political leader of the Muslim nation. As the Islamic conquest of Arabia gathered force in the seventh century CE, jihad became a tool of statecraft that could be wielded by the caliph when geostrategic circumstances warranted the defense, or favored the expansion, of Muslim territory. It was a theologically-grounded rallying cry for Muslims to take up arms for their nation, and thus represents the convergence of the political and religious in Islam.
In a mad dash through Islamic history, Phares describes the first great Arab fatah (opening) that took the Muslims from Mecca and Medina to Spain in the West and India in the East. The second great fatah saw the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and the fall of Constantinople, later renamed Istanbul, under the new Turkish caliphate.
The fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I signaled the collapse of the caliphate, and triggered the emergence of three competing perspectives on jihad. One faction rejected the doctrine all together while another ignored it, but they both accepted the basic tenets of international law. The third faction did not let go of jihad, but “reshaped its doctrines, and waged wars and conflicts in its name.” The members of this faction would come to be known as jihadists and the remainder of the book is devoted to describing who they are, how they perceive their struggle and the tactics they use to achieve their goals. The three main divisions of the jihadist enterprise include the Sunni Wahabis, the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, and the Shiia Khomeinis. Emanating from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran, respectively, these groups can be distinguished in several ways, but they do share a common, long-term goal: expansion of the dar el Islam (house of Islam) into the dar el harb (house of war). Of course, the dar el harb consists of all territories that fall outside the realm of fundamentalist rule, and the “kuffar” (infidels) who inhabit them are ultimately viewed as enemies. The jihadists believe that their interpretation of Islam is the only true one and thus see territorial expansion and conversion of infidels not as conquest, but liberation. They perceive the West as inherently evil, a materialistic and morally depraved entity that must be destroyed.
Phares then turns to the topic of the book’s subtitle. Terrorist strategies against America – and against Western civilization one might add – include not only suicide bombings, but also economic, ideological, diplomatic and other tactics, including surreptitious efforts to disguise their true intentions. Phares warns of the danger posed by the “second generation” of Islamists who are growing up within the West itself and will blend into mainstream culture while maintaining loyalty to an ingrained ideology bent on the destruction of liberal democracy.
To counter the jihadist threat, Phares proposes several interesting measures. The most important of these include: empowering moderate Muslims; adapting legal systems to deal more effectively with suspected and captured terrorists; and educating the public about the threat posed by jihadism.
Amid the critically important message of Future Jihad – that Islamic fundamentalists are not freedom fighters; rather they are deadly adversaries of Western civilization who must be defeated at all costs – a few substantive oversights and contradictions exist. Throughout the book, Phares aligns with the foreign policy hawks in asserting that appeasement only engenders a more aggressive enemy. He argues that the lackluster response to attacks on American interests overseas throughout the 1980s and 1990s convinced Osama bin Laden that the United States would not retaliate against terrorism. Moreover, bin Laden’s declaration of war against “America, the crusaders, and the Jews” in February 1998 “was met with total dismissal by Washington.” This inaction on the part of the United States, notes Phares, led al Qaeda to believe that the country was “ripe” for destruction, and encouraged even more deadly and provocative terrorist strikes. Thus, September 11.
Following this logic, Phares supports Bush administration aggressive policies in the global war on terrorism. But he also highlights bin Laden’s past grievances, including the Israeli Air Force strikes in Beirut in 1982, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the American troops on Arab lands during and after the first Gulf War. Clearly, these initiatives cannot be classified as “appeasement,” but they nevertheless seem to have exacerbated fundamentalist ire. Which, then, is the greater evil: action or inaction? Non-intervention may have emboldened al Qaeda in decades past, but operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom have not prevented terrorist attacks in Madrid and London, or, most recently, in Amman.
Unfortunately, Future Jihad does not explore the possibility that U.S. military forces deployed in the Middle East may indeed be an effective marketing tool for Islamic fundamentalism. In discussing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Phares points out that “the Afghani ‘battlefield’ drew ‘fighters’ from various countries…it became the basis out of which ‘the mother of all modern jihads’ would spring again.” With due consideration to the vast differences between the events of 1979 and the United States in Iraq today, there is still something harrowingly familiar in these remarks. And if Phares is correct in asserting that the Islamists measure victory by the perpetuation of their ideology to new recruits, then perhaps he needs to rethink his implicit assumption that non-intervention is always a bad idea.
Another misstep is Phares’s peremptory assertion that “the most natural responses to jihadism are freedom to civil societies and empowerment of democracy movements,” which “are the arch-opponents to religious fanaticism…particularly in the communities where jihadism appeared.” Here, Phares fails to reconcile this blind faith in democracy with the possibility that many Muslim societies, at least in the short-run, would very likely vote fundamentalists into power if given the chance. Phares even provides an example of this in telling us how the “Muslim Brotherhood invented ‘political jihad,’ which means using democracy to come to power so that they can destroy democracy.”
In addition, the vulnerability of liberal democracy to Islamist manipulation and infiltration is a recurring theme in Future Jihad. The trouble with stopping suicide bombers, notes Phares, is that 90 percent of their ideological indoctrination can occur under the common legal protections of Western governments. Religious freedom and free speech rights that facilitate proselytizing are bedrock principles in domestic and international law. The jihadists know how to use our cherished ideals and institutions against us, leading Phares to suggest tighter legal mechanisms that will foster more effective detection and imprisonment of known and suspected terrorists. But how can democracy be both the problem and the solution?
In the end, Future Jihad certainly highlights the seriousness of the threat we now face by exposing the jihadists’ totalitarian worldview and analyzing their tactics. In this sense, the book itself is an excellent starting point for rectifying the failure of education that Phares suggests was the root of America’s vulnerability before September 11. But as noted above, many critical questions remain with regard to how the United States and its allies around the world can most effectively combat Islamic fundamentalism and the terrorism it fosters.
Todd Walters is a Research Associate at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis in Cambridge, Mass. He will begin graduate studies at the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in January.
Which, then, is the greater evil: action or inaction? Non-intervention may have emboldened al Qaeda in decades past, but operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom have not prevented terrorist attacks in Madrid and London, or, most recently, in Amman.
But it has prevented attacks here in the U.S.
Freedom must be defended and evil defeated, period.
...They perceive the West as inherently evil, a materialistic and morally depraved entity that must be destroyed....
And the idiot liberals, those they hate the most, build them a brand new shiny mosque in Boston.
A free society, as opposed to totalitarian governments, has the right to protect itself in order to perpetuate the freedom of its citizens. That is what our sedition and treason laws are all about. That is valid for a free society but it is not valid for a closed society.
There is a reason we are no longer enforcing those laws. That reason is that the Communists and the Jihadists have similar goals and tactics and both are the enemy of freedom. They not only use our freedoms to under mind them, they seem to manage for us to pay for our destruction.
One of their key methods is to demand moral relativism. Each view has an equally valid opposing view, or so they say. The purpose of that is to eliminate moral certainty, a cornerstone to a free society. Once they have established that our society is no better than any other they are well on their way, and they are.
Free and open societies are unusually vulnerable to deception and defeat because of their nature, which is human nature and our God-given right and desire for individual freedom.
Our salvation is to doggedly stick to our historical moral values and belief in freedom and not being afraid to decalre it and defend it. That is what they are trying to destroy. We must not let them.
We will need to go into their beehives and spray disenfectant.
Walid Phares neo Isolationist?
Sources please.
He meant the reviewer, not the author of the book being reviewed.
The reviewer also seems to compare our actions in Iraq to the Soviet actions in Afghanistan. The reviewer is plain wrong. Tomorrow most of the Iraqis will vote for their own government, a chance the Soviets never gave anybody.
I knew that, I knew that. I was just seeing if anyone else would catch it.
That's my story and I'm stickin with it.
It's a topic that has not as yet undergone serious analysis - what have the Islamists wrought? There is a comfortable pretense that the Americans started this by an endless laundry-list of grievances, and that's fine for the fantasists that the international left and the Islamists seem to have become, but the real world is much more likely to be faced with the results of an armed and activist West that is no longer content to sit there and take it, with the possible exception of the French, of course. And I have to ask Mr. Walters to consider exactly what the effects of this activism are likely to be.
First, of course, is the overthrow of the system of internationalism under which Islamic terror thrived. Where there is no longer a UN to be manipulated there is a major tool shattered not only of the Islamists but of the left as well. Is this wise from their point of view? That is precisely what is happening. A putative world order is being destroyed by the reaction of the United States, Great Britain, and their allies to an Islamism to which the left has reflexively allied itself.
This really needs to be examined. What is happening is a revolution all right, but not the one the left has hoped for.
An interesting book I picked up the other day (haven't started reading it yet)
"The Case for Goliath"
How America acts as the worlds government in the 21st century
Michael Mandelbaum
Looks pretty good.
Very perceptive.
An assertive West, led by an activist America, constitutes the geopolitical equivalent of the irresistible force.
"Regime change in Iraq" may be only the beginning...
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