With Good Reason Seventh Anniversary: 9/11 and the Current State of Jihadism

Sep 9, 2008

Last Thursday I had lunch with a man I much admire and am honored to call a friend. Bret Stephens is a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, he writes the Journal's "Global View", which runs every Tuesday, and he is one of the sharpest thinkers I know on foreign affairs.  (In fact, I would especially encourage you to read his column today, entitled "Democratization and Its Discontents.") Bret's column of two years ago on Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg ("Pope Provocateur" WSJ, September 19, 2006) remains one of the finest analyses of the speech ever penned. I couldn't help asking Bret if he could interrupt his duties at the Journal to become the centerpiece of my column this week. He cordially acquiesced, and here is the fruit of an email interview that ensued over the weekend. As we approach the 7th anniversary of the 9/11 attack, Bret has once again put his keen insightfulness on display.

 

Berg: Why has there not been another Jihadist terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11?

 

Stephens: There's no one explanation. We know there have been serious attempts, foiled by a combination of luck (imagine if Richard Reid had simply used the airplane toilet to set off the bomb in his shoes) and good intelligence (the foiling of the summer 2006 plot to bring down trans-Atlantic airliners simultaneously). Plainly, the invasion of Afghanistan and the denial of a comfortable sanctuary to al Qaeda played a large role, as did the killing or capture of a considerable number of AQ's senior leadership from 2001 onwards. The war in Iraq played a large role: Literally thousands of jihadists from across the Arab world chose to stand their ground in this "central battleground," to use Ayman az-Zawahiri's term, and died there.

 

President Bush's fundamental insight - that the war on terrorists is better waged offensively than defensively - is right, and the dividends have been both strategic and ideological. The elimination of senior AQ cadres has forced the group to rely on an increasingly untested and often fractious tier of new recruits, who often have to spend the better part of their time attending to their own survival than to hatching new terrorist plots (a similar situation unfolded in the Palestinian areas in 2002-2005 as Israel pursued its policy of "targeted assassinations" and the rate of suicide bombings plummeted). Ideologically, AQ now finds itself, for the first time since 9/11, having to defend its tactics even among its own erstwhile fellow travelers, the best example of which is the public rift between Zawahiri and one-time jihadist comrade Sayeed Imam (the founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad) over the doctrinal justifications and tactical advisability of AQ's methods. This is a potential cultural earthquake in the Muslim world, one I doubt would have come about had the Administration not taken the war on terror to the heart of the Middle East.

 

Berg:  Why have there not been smaller attacks - Madrid-style bombings or a plague of suicide bombings in crowded American urban areas - which are arguably next to impossible to prevent?

 

Stephens: Part of the answer has to do with the very different nature of the Muslim-American community in the U.S. Though there are clear pockets of extremists - the New Jersey cell that perpetrated the first WTC attack in 1993; a Hezbollah linked Shiite cell in Michigan; allegations of extremist Pakistani cells in Lodi, California - the Muslim community in America is both much smaller than the one in Europe, much less Arab (a majority of Arab-Americans are not Muslim, and a majority of Muslim-Americans are not Arabs), much more prosperous economically and much more civically engaged. None of this equals 100% insurance against homegrown Muslim-American terrorism, but it is part of the explanation.

 

The second piece of the explanation I owe to Lee Harris, author of "Civilization and Its Enemies." As he observes there, "the targets were chosen by al Qaeda not for their military value - in contrast, for example the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized on the Arab street. They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life." If that's right, and I think it is, a series of small-scale attacks would simply have been inadequate to what you might call al Qaeda's sense of its world-historical purpose. Paradoxically, that may yet change as al Qaeda finds itself in straitened circumstances (see above) and seeks to remind, if that's the word, the United States of its abiding relevance.

 

Berg: You affirmed recently ("My Bet With Francis Fukuyama" WSJ, August 5, 2008) that the war in Iraq is over and the U.S. has won. A more predominant view might be that we are perhaps rather at the tail end of a protracted final phase of the war. Isn't it too soon to claim victory?

 

Stephens: There's a story today that the U.S. Army is no longer awarding combat citations to troops deployed to certain areas of Iraq because those areas have been so thoroughly pacified. That includes Anbar province, now fully under Iraq's sovereign administration. This tells us something. Nobody expected - and Bush explicitly noted in his Sept. 20 2001 address to Congress - that our wars on terrorism would not end with signing ceremonies aboard battleships. But what's clear is that we've reached a point in Iraq that cannot be realistically characterized by the word "war." Is there a better word, or phrase, or acronym? How about "Potentially Hostile Situation Other Than War," or PHSOTW. Well, we can work on that one.

 

There's an understandable reluctance on the part of people like Bush and Petraeus to declare "Mission Accomplished," not least because declaring an end to the war has political and security ramifications. But at some point it becomes unhelpful both to our understanding of where we are and where we should go to use inaccurate terminology. We have defeated Saddam Hussein, we have installed a democratic government that does not threaten its neighbors and can defend itself, we have destroyed both al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army as meaningful military threats either to ourselves or the Iraqi government. What other goals remain? We've won. We owe it not least to the soldiers who sacrificed their lives for victory that victory has at last been achieved and that their sacrifice was not in vain.

 

Berg: In that same column, you had no qualms about describing present day Iraq as a 'democracy.' Others would argue that it is still too early to see whether the new democratically inspired regime will really pass the test of time. But it seems you have great confidence in "democracy building" in the Arab world. What is the basis of your confidence?

 

Stephens: Iraq is a democracy by any reasonable description of the term. It has a lawfully chosen prime minister and an elected parliament, each with defined constitutional powers, it has political parties, universal suffrage and regular elections. The Iraqis have demonstrated their commitment to democracy by the endless tussles over the various pieces of legislation that have defined the so-called political benchmarks set for it last year. Maliki's hardball approach to a status-of-forces agreement with the U.S. is largely a function of domestic politics and elections scheduled for later this year. How is this not democratic, except that the institutions are obviously young and fragile? American institutions were in a similar stage when, for instance, Aaron Burr was around, or John C. Calhoun.

 

(Column continues below)

It is wrong to say that I have "great confidence" in democracy building. It is a fraught, dangerous and reversible process. What is true is that I have much less confidence in the Arab status quo that exists outside Iraq: the pressure-cooker authoritarianism of Egypt; the Saudi gerentocracy; Syria's (minority) Allawite regime. All of this strikes me as fundamentally unsustainable, whereas the processes now taking place in Iraq are, at least, potentially sustainable. Time will be the judge, but in the meantime it seems to me that both our long-term strategic interests as well as our moral values argue in favor of trying to seek democratic openings wherever we can plausibly do so.

 

Berg: But didn't the Bush administration's over-confidence in such democracy-building strategies set up the US to be blind-sided by the bloody insurgency that reigned chaos in Iraq just prior to the surge, a chaos which seemed to confirm that the Iraq war was an enormous strategic blunder?

 

Stephens: As for the mistakes of the Bush administration, they are too many to enumerate here. But plainly the establishment of a democratic Iraqi government was not one of those mistakes. On the contrary, it legitimized the entire effort. Just imagine an alternative scenario, in which we had installed a dictatorial puppet and then faced an insurgency: Would Americans, skeptical as they already are of the invasion, have stood for that?

 

Berg: In a fascinating article in the September issue of Commentary ("How to Manage Savagery"), you make the following argument, if I have understood you correctly: A bit over a decade ago, Samuel P. Huntington proffered the notion that much of the world was at the time on the cusp of, or already engulfed in, what he called a 'clash of civilizations.' With regard to Islam, you recall his idea that these clashes would be along Islam's "bloody borders." You suggest, however, that Huntington's theory has not played out, and that we are dealing rather today with the consequences of a self-destructive and imploding Islamic civilization.  You note, for example, how this is borne out by the very recent history of Iraqi Muslims: Shiites killing Kurds, Sunnis killing Sunnis, Shiites killing Sunnis, Shiites killing Shiites. You note that over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in these conflicts since 2006.

 

What does this mean for the future of Jihadism and what bearing does it have on how western civilization should defend itself?

 

Stephens: Regime change is difficult; civilization change (to coin a phrase) much more so. The Muslim world has been in a convulsive state for many decades now, but other than the toll it has taken in social development and human lives it is unclear how long that convulsion will last and what course it will take. It is plainly an urgent task to make sure that those convulsions don't again wash up on our shore. Particularly in a globalized world, that gives us no choice but to stabilize the patient, reverse his deterioration, and address the symptoms as well as the causes of his malady.

 

There are, of course, limits to what the West can do here, just as there are limits to what a doctor can do to heal his patient. But that isn't to say nothing can be done. Throughout the 1990s the Clinton administration tried to coax various Muslim regimes along a path of reform: Iran, the Palestinians, the Egyptians and so on. It didn't work. Following 9/11, the Bush administration opted for shock therapy. It might yet work. We'll see. As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr once said, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.