Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

Two simple truisms seem appropriate these days when discussing the Afghan war: “If you don’t understand your enemy, you will lose to him” and “If you do not kill your enemies, they will surely kill you.” U.S. political, military, and civil service leaders have neither tried to understand what motivates the Taliban and its allies nor have they tried to comprehensively kill them. As a result, they now stand at the inevitable destination — the brink of a vastly humiliating defeat that cannot be disguised.

Following are four points that are useful to keep in mind when listening to the nonsense about a “negotiated settlement” in Afghanistan that is now flowing from the mouths of Obama, Brennan, Clinton, Levin, Petraeus, and prime ministers Cameron (UK) and Harper (Canada).

1. The United States and its NATO allies already have announced their defeat at the hands of the Afghan mujahideen. The U.S. and Britain will begin withdrawing troops next month at a time when the mujahideen have the battlefield initiative; have thoroughly infiltrated Karzai’s government and military and security forces; and have ample funds, arms, and volunteers provided by their benefactors on the Arabian Peninsula.
2. The Taliban have heard the U.S.-NATO coalition announce its surrender and have no reason to think there is any Western will left to fight, especially after hearing Obama whine out this week his and the West’s fatal lack of bloody-mindedness in yet another weepy apology for civilian Afghan casualties. This war is absolutely a zero-sum game for the Taliban, the other mujahideen, and Pakistan — a mindset that the West believes no longer exists — and U.S.-NATO claims about likely compromise from the mujahideen’s side is no more than idle chatter meant to give Western populations hope where there is none.
3. Given NATO’s near-term withdrawal, the absence of Western willpower, and the combat ineffectiveness of Karzai’s forces the Taliban and its allies will continue their thousand-cut campaign, and let Obama and his NATO colleagues talk amongst themselves and to their media acolytes about the equitable negotiated peace that is approaching. In addition, Pakistan’s army and intelligence services — sick of its effete Western allies’ obsessive insistence that its Pakistan’s duty bleed and win the war for them — will increase aid to the Taliban and its allies to ensure that Karzai’s regime and India’s presence in Afghanistan are in time erased after NATO retreats. Pakistan will be supported in this endeavor by Arab Peninsula regimes eager to see an Islamist government restored in Kabul that will block the extension if Shiism through Afghanistan into Central Asia.
4. When the U.S.-NATO coalition withdraws or is driven out by the mujahideen, the Taliban, and its allies: (a) will reestablish an Islamist government that will rule over most of the country with the same religion-based, brutal, but effective law-and-order regime that held sway on 10 September 2001, and this will be welcomed by most Afghans; (b) will wage a war of revenge against the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Shias who were ahistorical enough to think the U.S. and its allies know how to win wars and stupid enough to support a vicious Western cultural war aimed at destroying Afghanistan’s conservative Islamic and tribal culture; and (c) will welcome al-Qaeda and other non-Afghan Islamist insurgent groups to resettle in Afghanistan, knowing full well that the West will not be back to fight, except with its usual feckless combination of threatening rhetoric and the long-failed of policy of trying to achieve victory by killing or capturing its Islamist enemies one at a time.

One final point is worth making about the coming U.S.-NATO defeat in Afghanistan, this one in regard to the Muslim world as a whole — which now includes North America and Europe — and especially its young men. When the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989, it had a galvanizing impact on Osama bin Laden’s generation of young men. For the first time in several centuries, Allah had allowed Muslims to defeat a Western power, and one of the world’s two superpowers at that. Much of the inspiration that has put mujahideen on the battlefield against the West and Israel since 1989 flowed from the defeat of the Red Army, and the Muslim world’s consequent belief that the mujahideen had destroyed the Soviet Empire.

Even with this victory and even after the victory of 9/11, however, bin Laden, his lieutenants, and their allies found that they continued to encounter a deeply engrained defeatism among Muslims. The rhetoric of bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and other Islamist leaders contains a clear and consistent theme that such defeatism must be overcome in each Muslim before Allah will reward His faithful with victory over their remaining enemies. In other words, the Islamists’ message to their fellow Muslims is that Allah will not help those who do not get off their behinds and help themselves. The continuity of this theme in the post-bin Laden period is apparent in al-Qaeda’s 3 June 2001, 100-minute motivational video entitled “You are responsible only for thyself.”

It will be difficult, to be sure, to measure the worldwide galvanizing impact of the mujahideens’ Taliban-led defeat of the U.S.-NATO coalition in Afghanistan and the subsequent reestablishment of an Islamic Emirate there. But could that impact possibly be less than that which followed the Soviets’ defeat? In 1989, after all, there was no Internet and 24-hour Arabic television coverage of the Red Army’s humiliation; today such coverage is intense and ubiquitous. In addition, the mujahideen will have beaten the second superpower and its most militarily potent allies not only in Afghanistan but in Iraq as well — something no other power on earth ever has accomplished. Most important, this accomplishment will be seen across the Islamic world as both the result of Allah’s will and His reward for those Muslims who got off their behinds to fight and defeat His and Islam’s infidel enemies.

Overall, the decision by Western political leaders to allow their armies to be so easily and cheaply beaten in Afghanistan will have for them and their peoples very unfortunate and bloody long-term consequences.

In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, it is of first importance to confront the reality that al-Qaeda is an insurgent organization, not a terrorist group. This is not a mere semantic difference.

• Al-Qaeda remains a formidable foe, even after bin Laden’s death, because it is a large, veteran, well-organized, and resilient insurgent group that long ago institutionalized planning for leadership succession in all facets of its operations, military, financial, logistical, training, etc.
• There is, in fact, no better proof that al-Qaeda is an insurgent organization — and that the West fools itself by terming it a “terrorist group” — than its ability to absorb the killing of so many senior leaders while still functioning effectively and expanding in numbers and geographical reach.
• In terms of senior leaders killed, moreover, there is no Islamist terrorist group America has ever fought that could have endured and survived the punishment U.S. military and intelligence services have meted out to al-Qaeda since the late 1990s.

Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are both products of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets and their Afghan communist allies (1979-1992). This experience not only taught them that with faith, patience, and contiguous safe haven a superpower can be beaten, but that any group aspiring to fight and defeat a superpower must be prepared to suffer heavy and repeated loses not only of foot soldiers but also of leaders, including the most senior leaders of an organization.

• Bin Laden built al-Qaeda on the pattern of the major Afghan Islamist insurgent groups that fought the Red Army; namely, those of Ahmad Shah Masood, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, and Yunis Khalis. These groups all suffered steady and significant leadership casualties at the hands of the Soviet military, which engaged in assassination operations on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border during their ten-year occupation of the former. The Soviets found it impossible to defeat the Afghan insurgent organizations by killing their leaders, a process Washington is now calling “cutting off the head of the snake.”
• The Afghan Islamist groups, moreover, put a great deal of effort into succession planning not just because of Soviet targeted killings, but also because they suffered significant leadership loses from the internecine battles that raged between and among them; this was especially true for the groups of Masood and Gulbuddin. To date, this source of leadership losses is not one al-Qaeda has faced.
• Bin Laden — and, incidentally, Mullah Omar — took this lesson to heart, and since the early 1990s built an organization that expends substantial amounts of time, thought, and training preparing for leadership succession at all its levels.

As noted, the attrition of al-Qaeda’s leadership ranks has been steady for much more than a dozen years. Renditions, targeted killings, and battlefield kills and captures have all taken a toll, and yet there is little indication that the U.S.-NATO coalition has anything more than a body count to show for its work. Killing or capturing al-Qaeda leaders one at a time provides no credible metric with which to measure the overall progress of the U.S.-NATO war effort.

For the core of al-Qaeda, successful preparation for leadership losses is most apparent in the position of the group’s overall military commander.

• Al-Qaeda’s first military commander, Abu Ubaydah al-Panshiri, for example, died in Africa by drowning in May, 1996.
• Abu Ubaydah was replaced by Muhammad Atef — also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri — who ran al-Qaeda’s military operations until he was killed in Kandahar in November, 2001.
• Muhammad Atef was immediately succeeded by the former-Egyptian Special Forces officer, Sayf al-Adl.
• Sayf al-Adl remained commander until he was caught while traveling in Iran and held under house arrest for several years by Iranian authorities.
• Al-Adl was replaced by Abu Faraj al-Libi, who was captured in Pakistan in May, 2005.
• Al-Qaeda’s overall military commander since Abu Faraj’s death has been difficult to determine from open sources, but much attention has been focused on the U.S.-citizen Muslim, Adnan Shukrajuma.
• Most recently, Sayf al-Adl is reported to have been released by Iran and has returned to al-Qaeda. Media reports claim al-Adl has been named interim leader for bin Laden. After bin Laden’s permanent successor is selected by al-Qaeda’s Shura Council, al-Adl may resume his former post as al-Qaeda’s overall military commander, and Shukrajuma may return to leading operations aimed at the continental United States, a post he is reported to have held before the death of Abu Faraj.

The foregoing rough — and perhaps incomplete — chronology represents a significant level of attrition among al-Qaeda’s senior leaders, and yet, through it all, U.S. and British civilian and military intelligence estimates have continued to conclude that al-Qaeda remains a potent threat to the United States and its major allies at home and abroad.

It also must be noted that core al-Qaeda’s ability to fill significant and recurring leadership losses is also a characteristic shared by its branches outside South Asia.

• In Yemen, for example, al-Qaeda’s senior and talented chief, Abu Ali al-Harethi, was killed by a drone strike early in the war. Al-Qaeda in Yemen had difficulty in immediately finding a qualified replacement and lost several of al-Harethi’s successors until Abu Wahayashi escaped from a Yemeni prison and took over the post. Wahayashi — bin Laden’s former private secretary — now commands al-Qaeda-in-the-Arabian Peninsula [AQAP] and must be viewed as a candidate to succeed bin Laden. AQAP also appears to be al-Qaeda’s preferred venue for exhibiting and developing the talents of U.S.-citizen Muslim volunteers who join the group, including Samir Khan and Anwar al-Awlaki.
• In Saudi Arabia, the al-Qaeda organization lost at least a half dozen leaders since its first leader, Abd-al-Aziz al-Muqrin, was killed in the middle of 2003. This severe attrition in large part led to combining the Saudi and Yemeni branches of al-Qaeda and basing the overall command of al-Qaeda operations on the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen.
• In Iraq, al-Qaeda-in-Iraq [AQI] lost its commander, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in 2006 and then lost his replacement and its Iraq military commander — Abu Umar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Muhajir, respectively — on the same day in 2010. The now resurgent AQI organization currently is led by Abu Bakr Husseini al-Baghdadi.
• Al-Qaeda-in-the-Islamic-Mahgreb [AQIM], al-Qaeda’s allied group in Somalia [al-Shabbab], and al-Qaeda’s branches in Lebanon and Palestine have likewise replaced killed senior leaders while continuing to conduct organizational expansion, media activities, and military operations.
• Beyond the leaders of these branches, al-Qaeda also has replaced such senior figures as Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Tawfiq bin Atash, Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nasiri, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, Abu Layth al-Libi, Abu Mustafa Abu-al-Yazid, and dozen or more senior leaders who were captured before 9/11.

While planning for succession always has been a priority for al-Qaeda, the process was intensified after 9/11 both because of the group’s losses and bin Laden’s concern for al-Qaeda’s survivability in the event of his death, whatever its cause.

• Since he began speaking publicly in 1996, bin Laden said that he did not expect to live to see the end of the war he had declared against the United States. His wish, he said, was to die a martyr; he hoped that, if God granted him such a death, his blood would inspire young Muslims to join the jihad, which he clearly expected to be a multi-generational struggle.
• Reflecting this fatalism, bin Laden and his lieutenants after 9/11 began to disperse the organization in an effort to ensure that it could not be decapitated by the kind of operation that finally killed bin Laden. In this effort, they were overwhelmingly successful.
• At 9/11, for example, the majority of al-Qaeda’s manpower, training facilities, and planning operations were concentrated in Afghanistan, and much of that infrastructure was wrecked by the U.S.-NATO coalition by the middle of 2002.
• But even given this disaster, bin Laden presided over a dispersal process that today sees al-Qaeda with some presence in Afghanistan, and strong branches in Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, the Levant, Palestine, Iraq, and across North Africa. Objectively, al-Qaeda today possesses a larger organization than it had at 9/11, as well as a far broader geographic base.
• In addition, bin Laden in the last five years of his life devoted time and resources to building al-Qaeda’s influence and operational capabilities in the English-speaking world. Through the rhetorical, operational, and media skills of U.S.-citizen Muslims like Azzam al-Amriki [Adam Gadahn], Adnan Shukrajuma, Samir Khan [Inspire Magazine], Omar Hammami [Somalia], and Anwar al-Awalki, al-Qaeda has inspired U.S.-citizen Muslims to undertake violent activities inside the United States, men such as Major Nidal Hassan [Fort Hood], Najibullah Zazi [NYC subways], and Faisal Shahzad [Times Square].
• That bin Laden consciously sought to prepare al-Qaeda and the Islamic world for his demise can also be seen in his relative quiet over the past five years, a quiet that was filled by repeated media presentations showcasing men from al-Qaeda’s next generation of leaders — men such as Abu Yaha al-Libi, Anwar al-Awalki, Abu Wahayashi, and Azzam al-Amriki. This process was aimed at acquainting Muslims with al-Qaeda’s future leaders.
• Overall, the success of al-Qaeda’s dispersal efforts has not only made the organization nearly impossible to decapitate, it has given it multiple operational platforms it did not possess in 2001. The activities of these branches, moreover, give many more men the opportunity to train, gain combat experience, and develop as leaders than did the al-Qaeda organization that existed on or before 9/11. The branches — which today are seldom the venue of U.S. drone or Special Forces attacks — likewise ensure that a pool of quality leadership candidates is largely safe and readily available for al-Qaeda’s senior leaders to designate as successors-in-waiting for those leaders who surely will be lost in combat or via capture.

In conclusion, it is fair to say that al-Qaeda has long been well prepared to handle the unexpected death of leaders, even of bin Laden himself.

• After nearly 16 years of trying, as the last three U.S. presidents have said, to bring al-Qaeda’s leaders “to justice one at a time,” the West finds itself faced with a most welcome body count of dead al-Qaeda leaders, but with no credible measure of progress against the group as a whole, much less the movement it inspires and instigates.
• While the West must clearly continue to kill and capture as many al-Qaeda leaders in as many places as possible, this alone will not stop the steady growth in al-Qaeda’s size and thus in its ability to replace leaders. Likewise, the martyrdom of bin Laden and other senior leaders is likely to inspire numbers of young men to join the cause.
• Until the West’s political leadership accepts the clear reality that young Muslims are inspired to join al-Qaeda and its Islamist allies not only because of the words and deeds of the groups and their leaders, but because of what Western governments do in the Muslim world, U.S. military and intelligence services will find that their efforts to kill or capture al-Qaeda leaders and other Islamist chiefs will do little to slow the growth of the international militant Islamist movement in the coming generation, and with it the threat to U.S. interests at home and abroad.

While some in the media swoon over President Obama’s “plan” for the Middle East — note the Washington Post’s piece by David Ignatius — and the Israel-First fifth column prepares to teach the Democrats a lesson in 2012, the rest of us common folk can see how irrelevant we are to the foreign-policy plans of Mr. Obama and our bipartisan political elite.

In his May 19th, 2011, speech, Obama details our elite’s desire to reshape the Muslim world in its image, an image which has nothing to do with America and everything to do with a coterie of very well educated elitists issuing edicts that tell Americans and Muslims to accept behavioral instructions from their betters and then think, act, and vote accordingly. And Mr. Obama, again, demonstrated the bankruptcy of the U.S. educational system. A product of two of our most prestigious universities, Mr. Obama was arrogant, ignorant of the world, and blithely unaware that he is either.

Adopting the crazed and crusading words of Mr. Bush and the Neoconservatives, Obama began his Middle East speech by saying “we know our own future is bound to this region,” and proceeded to instruct the Islamic world that, because this is true, Muslims must become just like us — or else. From there on, Obama signals his and our political elite’s disdain for Americans and assumes a mantle of interventionism much more encompassing than anything ever worn by the lamentable Woodrow Wilson.

In his arrogance, Obama condemns “the relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity” and argues that “[i]n too many countries, power has been concentrated in the hands of too few,” referring in each case to Arab dictators. He seems unaware that he also described a U.S. government that, under both parties, has for thirty years denied its own citizens dignity at every turn:

• Both parties have ruined the economy so we have to hold out the begging bowl to Chinese and Arab dictators. They also have created 9-percent unemployment; made the nation hostage to foreign oil producers; put 45-plus million Americans on food stamps; and left 20-percent of American kids without enough to eat.
• Both parties have made our military contemptible by refusing to allow U.S. forces to win wars our presidents unconstitutionally start.
• Both parties have refused to enforce existing immigration and border-control laws so that Mexico’s impoverished population, endemic corruption, and drug-related violence are flowing into our southwestern states. The Democrats also use this festering wound they and the Republicans created to prepare the ground to abridge the 2nd Amendment.
• And while all this goes on, both parties steal money from the pockets of U.S. citizens to give to Israel, spend on the defense of the Saudi tyranny, and fund an Egypt run by a military dictatorship.

Obama and his bipartisan colleagues do not seem to realize that tyranny can be defined not only as political and physical oppression by foreign regimes, but by the callousness, indifference, incompetence, and lawlessness of the United States government. Ought not Washington give top priority to the “dignity” of U.S. citizens, who are, after all, the ones who pay taxes and see their soldier-children die to help Bush and Obama chase the insane goal of giving dignity and U.S. wealth to foreigners?

In his ignorance of the world, the super-Wilsonian Obama then performed as an interventionist extraordinaire, detailing his diktats to the Muslim world and Israel:

• Obama out-Bushed Bush and the Neoconservatives by a country mile, calling for U.S.-dictated (and enforced?) regime change in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Iran, and Yemen.
• Obama unilaterally declared Islam out and secular democracy in. He then redeclared Mrs. Clinton’s cultural/feminist war on Muslim society and Islamic culture by announcing that Washington demands the implementation of “free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly; freedom of religion, equally for men and women under the rule of law; and the right to choose your own leaders — whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus; Sanaa or Tehran.”
• Obama dismissed some of the age-old and lethal religious problems in Islamic civilization — Coptic Christians-vs.-Muslims, Shia-vs.-Sunni — as meaningless rivalries akin to those between Kiwanis and Rotarians. Obama never recognized that he, Mrs. Clinton, Senator Graham, and Senator McCain ensured the slaughter of more Egyptian Copts by promoting “democracy” in Egypt, and that he and Bush increased the hatred of Sunnis for Shias by making Iraq a Shia state, a move that increases the chance of regional sectarian warfare. He finishes with a goal that could not be enforced by all the military might at America’s disposal: “Coptic Christians must have the right to worship freely in Cairo, just as the Shia must never have their mosques destroyed in Bahrain.” Obama also seems to forget that he, Bush, and Petraeus got a semblance of stability in Baghdad because they allowed the Shias” sectarian cleansing of most of the city’s Sunni population.
• Obama intervened more deeply into a Muslim-Israeli religious war that is irrelevant to U.S. national interests and security. He ordered Israel to obey his new policy on a return to the 1967 borders, thereby undermining its right to defend itself as its leaders see fit. No country has a “right to exist,” but all have an absolute right to defend themselves. Obama, in dictating to Israel, takes the fallacious right-to-exist doctrine and adds to it the caveat “as long as Barack and Hillary approve.” [1] On this issue, Obama once again proves he, his party, and the Republicans cannot get a handle on the Founders” simple definition of non-intervention, which is; do not get involved in foreign disputes and wars in which you have no interest. (NB: Some U.S. citizens who call themselves non-interventionists also misdefine non-interventionism on this issue by arguing that non-interventionism means being anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian.) The appropriate non-interventionist position is: A pox on Israel and Palestine, both are absolutely unessential to U.S. interests or security and should receive no U.S. funding or protection. [2]
• Obama abolished the sovereignty of the nation-states he dislikes and promised to direct U.S. officials to use money and technology in an interventionist campaign across the Muslim world that will create chaos, violence, and Islamist strength, not democracy. “Our message is simple,” Obama said, in words fit for a man unfamiliar with reality, “if you take the risks reform entails, you will have the full support of the United States. — Across the region, we intend to provide assistance to civil society, including those who may not be officially sanctioned, and who speak uncomfortable truths. And we will use the technology to connect with — and listen to — the voices of the people.”

After detailing his interventionist, democracy-mongering, and probably war-producing agenda, Obama caps his crusader presentation with a monumental lie: “So we face a historic opportunity — There must be no doubt that the United States of America welcomes change that advances self-determination and opportunity.” For Obama and our bipartisan governing elite nothing could be farther from the truth. These men and women welcome “self-determination and opportunity” only if it results in secularism and Western-style democracy, which, of course, requires the destruction of Islam.

In his May 19th speech, Obama declared war on most of the world’s Muslim population; made himself the agent through which Professor Huntington’s warning of a “clash of civilizations” will become reality; and ensured that the remembered words and deeds of Osama bin Laden will continue to inspire young Muslims to hate and fight the U.S. government for its unrelenting interventionism in the Muslim world.

1. One can never rule out the chance that Obama cleared his remarks with Netanyahu before he spoke. By insisting that HAMAS must recognize Israel’s “right to exist,” Obama and Netanyahu may be betting that HAMAS stands by its guns — as it will when asked to surrender because of a “right” dreamed-up by the West — and thereby can be made to take the fall for another breakdown of the “peace process.”
2. If Obama blind-sided the Israeli government, the one positive aspect of his intervention is that he might have cost himself and the Democrats the 2012 election by alienating the Israel-First fifth column of U.S. citizens, much of the media, AIPAC, and the AIPAC-suborned Congress. Electing the Republican Party as it is currently configured is no improvement, but Obama’s defeat would show Americans how deeply U.S.-citizen Israel Firsters have corrupted their political system, while simultaneously cutting Israel’s throat with their maximalist, Muslim-hating positions. With this corruption manifest, Americans might then begin to eradicate these agents of a foreign power from U.S. political life.

While Mrs. Clinton, General Petraeus, and Senator Kerry leak information to the media about “accelerating” peace talks with the Taliban, Mullah Omar and his lieutenants are thanking Allah for Islam’s clearly approaching victory in Afghanistan. The Clinton-Petraeus-Kerry disinformation now flowing is simply meant to prepare Americans for a U.S.-led surrender in Afghanistan. We are defeated there, and while Democrats and Republicans may tart up the retreat of the U.S.-NATO coalition as “mission accomplished,” the truth will be that the second superpower was defeated in Afghanistan by mujahideen armed only with faith and weaponry of Korean War vintage.

U.S. officials have told the media that they are talking to Taliban leaders about what “conditions” they want in exchange for joining a Karzai-led Afghan government. They ought to save their time. The Taliban and its allies today want what they have demanded since 12 September 2001: POWER. This is the non-negotiable demand of Mullah Omar, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and other Afghan insurgent leaders. These men know that the Afghan war is a zero-sum game; they either win or they lose. They also know that there will be no post-NATO coalition arrangement that lasts any longer than the departure of the last Western bayonet. The Afghan leaders may give the U.S.-NATO coalition a decent interval to withdrawal — as they did the Red Army — but Karzai and any of his colleagues who stay behind will be tortured, carved up, and then hung from the same lampposts the Afghan communist leader Najibullah and his sidekicks were hung from in the 1990s after Moscow abandoned them.

Currently, the Taliban and its allies are on top of the world. The Obama administration, the British and French governments, and most of the other coalition countries are publicly discussing an accelerated withdrawal. Telling Mullah Omar and his colleagues that you are going to leave is — of course — music to the ears of men whose forte is patience, fatalism, and a killer instinct. And after all, what could be a more heady experience for Allah’s warriors than to hear the leaders of infidelity publicly admit they are licked and about to creep shamefully away, tails appropriately between legs.

The death of Osama bin Laden also helps the Taliban. Mullah Omar and the other mujahideen would have preferred that he lived, but his death does not hurt the Taliban’s war effort. At the most basic level, U.S. military officials already have said that al-Qaeda’s main assistance to the Taliban — training, logistical support, and intelligence gathering — continues without interruption. In addition, Mullah Omar will be forever honored across the Muslim world as the one Muslim leader who was willing to defy the United States and temporarily lose his country to host and protect a fellow Muslim mujahideen, the “great lion of Islam,” Osama bin Laden. Omar’s protection of bin Laden moved the largely localized Taliban movement onto the Islamic world’s center stage.

Bin Laden’s death also removes a hindrance from Taliban fund-raising. As long as bin Laden was alive and closely identified with Omar and the Taliban, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Peninsula regimes had to be circumspect in how much and how openly they funneled money to the Afghans. Absent bin Laden — and given their growing anger and contempt for the Obama administration’s slavish support for Israel and back-stabbing of Arab leaders — the Saudi regime and its fellow Gulf tyrannies can be less clandestine and more generous in moving funds to the Taliban, which, after all, is more accurately described as the product of the Saudi religious establishment, rather than that of Pakistani machinations. Private donations to the Taliban from wealthy Gulf Arabs and wealthy Muslims worldwide never ceased, and now are likely to increase.

Finally, the Taliban will receive even more support from the Pakistan’s army and intelligence service. With Obama and NATO leaders having thrown in the towel in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s generals must move to start cleaning up the mess NATO will leave behind and to begin stabilizing their country, which first of all means finding a modus vivendi with the Pakistani Taliban that will begin to curtail that group’s violence inside Pakistan.

If that can be accomplished — and supplies of Arab-provided money and guns will speak loudly — the generals will then encourage the Pakistani Taliban to assist Mullah Omar and his allies in intensifying their war of attrition against the U.S.-NATO coalition and, after the coalition’s defeat, to aid in the destruction of Karzai’s regime. All of this promotes Pakistan’s vital national interests: lessening domestic violence; removing U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Pakistan; eliminating Karzai’s pro-Iran, pro-India regime; reinstalling an Islamist government in Kabul; and leaving India’s presence in Afghanistan untenable, thereby restoring Pakistan’s strategic depth on its western border and allowing the repositioning of military units to its border with India.

The way ahead in Afghanistan, therefore, seems to have been clearly demarcated by the West’s feckless politicians, diplomats, and — most especially — generals. The coming bottom line appears to be: The West loses, and the Taliban wins.

But not so fast, there is more to it. While it is true that the West loses, it is more accurate to say that Islam wins. And when thinking about what that victory will mean, it is worth recalling that Osama’s bin Laden and his generation were galvanized in favor of defending Islam via a jihad by the Afghan mujahideens’ defeat of the Soviet superpower in Afghanistan. It probably is wise — although a bit late — to ponder what impact the mujahideens’ defeat of the U.S. superpower in Afghanistan and Iraq will have on this generation of young Muslims, including those in North America.

With Osama bin Laden’s death it seemed for a moment that the U.S. government and the media might begin to assess why al-Qaeda and the Islamist movement are larger, more geographically dispersed, and more active in the United States then they were at 9/11. Having treated bin Laden for more than decade as a celebrity rather than as the thoughtful leader and modern manager he was, his death ought to have sidelined the Entertainment-Tonight approach to bin Laden/al-Qaeda/Islamist analysis and allowed all concerned — officials, journalists and citizens — a chance to step back and ask why America’s Islamist problem continues to expand. Two weeks after bin Laden’s death, however, the chance of such a clear-headed assessment — like the so-called Arab Spring — seems to be fading. [1]

First things first. The Obama administration and the Republicans and Democrats in Congress are making a hash of the aftermath of the raid that eliminated of bin Laden. The CIA and the U.S. military conducted a highly professional operation that accomplished its goal with no casualties. Since the Navy Seals returned to their bases in safety, the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government have engaged in an orgy of self-immolation in terms of America’s defense, one that benefits only the media they pander to. Leaking information about the military’s stealth helicopters gives all and sundry knowledge of a U.S. advantage best kept secret. Descriptions of the CIA observation post in Abbottabad make it extraordinarily more difficult to repeat that achievement against a now embarrassed, and therefore energized and alert, Pakistani security establishment.

The steady leaking of details about how bin Laden communicated with his organization titillates journalists and their readers, and allow Obama, John Brennan, Eric Holder, the sad likes of Lieberman, McCain, Graham, and other elected members of both parties to thump their chests, while giving al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups a useful and precise inventory about what we know of their communications systems at a time when they are racing to change and disguise them. The ignorant-of-Islam manner in which bin Laden’s burial was handled — his own followers, for example, would have torn down any shrine set up to mark his burial place on land — again underscores the lack of any conception whatsoever among our media and bipartisan political elite that America is involved in an expanding religious war. And while there is no cause to appease the enemy, it is always wise to avoid gratuitous errors — like bin Laden’s burial at sea — that benefit the Islamists and resonate negatively across the Islamic world among militant, moderate, and nominal Muslims.

Having frittered away many of the benefits wrought by the courage of CIA officers and the Seals for base political motives, Obama, McCain, and untold other senior officials — elected and unelected — also have reinforced their already strong positions as the chief recruiting sergeants for al-Qaeda and the Islamist movement as whole. Claiming to have dealt a decisive blow against the limited number of Muslim thugs who hate our freedoms and lifestyle by killing bin Laden, our bipartisan political elite has once again demonstrated its willful ignorance of what motivates our Islamist foes. Not caring a whit about elections, gender equality, or civil liberties in U.S. society, the Islamists are motivated by our foreign policy — especially Washington’s slavish support for Israel and defense of the Saudi police state — and by Washington’s cultural war that seeks to impose secular democracy on Islamic civilization. This crusade has been waged by the last four U.S. presidents, but by no one more fanatically than Hilary Clinton and her I-Pad-distributing band of State Department imperialists. When you look for the Islamists’ motivation, as well as the basis of their appeal to the coming generation of young Muslims, you need look no farther than Mrs. Clinton’s half-baked pro-feminist, anti-Islamic cultural crusade.

And before the end of May, Obama, leading politicians in both parties, and the media will further cauterize the bleeding caused Islamists by bin Laden’s death via a matched pair of events which — in their simple absurdity — are worthy of a Marx Brothers’ movie. The media is reporting that President Obama — even as he and NATO merrily bomb hell out of Libyans — will soon deliver another we’re-all-peaceful-friends address to “the Muslim world,” like the Kiplingesque effort he delivered in Cairo when Mubarak was still his bosom friend. Most likely he will identify bin Laden’s killing as a success for the West and for the Muslim world — ignoring bin Laden’s heroic, Robin-Hood-like status therein — and then go on to tell all Muslims how they need to be more like Westerners. Obama will assure them — as he assured Americans in the 2008 campaign — that Washington is willing to help them ditch their old-time religion and rifles and step into the bright, if sordid light of modern paganism he, his party, and many Republicans represent and seek to install worldwide.

Having thus hectored Muslims in his best Wilsonian manner, Obama will then welcome America’s most reliably dangerous and war-mongering enemy to Washington, Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Having just assured the Muslim world of his good intentions, Arabic print media and satellite television channels will cover Obama talking, dining, and briefing the press with Netanyahu. They will then broadcast to the Muslim world coverage of Netanyahu speaking to a joint session of Congress and calling for more punitive measures against the Palestinians, war with Iran, and U.S. taxpayer funds to help Israel arm its military and steal more land. Most damagingly, the Muslim world will see most of the 535 Congressman and Senators — bought and paid for by AIPAC and other Israel-First U.S. citizens — stand and wildly applaud Netanyahu’s call for a war on Iran and so, in essence, an endless war with Islam. Muslims will draw the only possible logical conclusion: “Osama was right, no matter what the Americans say; they are bent on destroying Islam.”

One longs to hear Groucho, as President-Captain Spaulding, saying to Israelis and Palestinians, “Hello, I must be going, you boys fight it out to the death and, if anybody lives, ring me when it’s over.” Alas, that’s not to be. America’s unnecessary war with Islam will continue to bleed and bankrupt us, many in coming generation of Muslims will enlist in the jihad, and Osama — wherever he is — will be smiling and thanking Allah for enemies such as Obama, Bush, Clinton and the malignant and disloyal [2] Israel-Firsters who are driving America to more wars, economic ruin, and international isolation.

Endnotes

1. One kind of specious analysis, however, seems to have been skewered by leaks describing bin Laden’s hands-on management of al-Qaeda even from hiding. This is the social scientists’ pet theory of “leaderless jihad,” which — like their other fatuous theory about deradicalizing Islamists — has never been much more than a means by which social scientists can entrance naive politicians and thereby get their hands on money from the public treasury.
2. The term “disloyal” in this context refers to any U.S. citizen who seeks — via rhetoric, lobbying, bribery, campaign contributions, or media manipulation — to involve the United States in another country’s wars or external disputes even though no U.S. interests are at risk. The Israel-Firsters certainly fall into this category, as do George Clooney and his fellow Hollywood celebrities who have helped to create a situation in Africa that will lead to war by successfully pressing the U.S., the UN, and the EC to back the theft of oil-rich lands from Muslim Sudan and give them to a new Christian state apparently to be called Southern Sudan.

Since Osama bin Laden died, my Israel-First friends have returned to attacking me with gusto. Good old british18@earthlink.net — I think his name is Mark Grayson, who claims to be a brilliant and wealthy lawyer — popped up to threaten me with legal action, and someone person called Alan Reynolds (iihmg@yahoo.com) has begun sending slanderous materials about me to the media outlets I appeared on or talked to this week, starting with the Dallas Morning News. Worth noting is that Reynolds recommends that people talk to the scholar Walid Phares rather than me. Readers of this space will recall that Mr. Phares’ name also came up in the mix during the last spate of Israel-First attacks on me.

But the most interesting development in this round of Israel-First threats and attacks is the appearance of a person called “Margaret King” (margaretking28@yahoo.com). She has written to FOX along the same slanderous line as Mr. Reynolds above —Ms. King indicated that a man named Larry Johnson (ix.netcom.com) did the “research” — and she also has written to tell me that she is sending my “anti-Semitic” comments to the President and Provost at Georgetown. This is the tactic of old British18, but she says she and Israel-First have control over tenure appointments at Georgetown and will get them to deny me tenure — I’m an adjunct professor, so not eligible for tenure — just as she and Israel First got Yale to deny tenure to Juan Cole. She also infers that she and her money got me fired from the Jamestown Foundation. I have responded with sarcastic and snotty comments which led to the following notes from her.

Here is what Ms. King said about wrecking Professor Juan Cole’s career at Yale after I said that her threats to my tenure chances didn’t scare me a lick (since I didn’t have any such chances):

1.) From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com>
To: scheuermf@aol.com
Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 4:48 pm
Not a problem. Georgetown University senior personnel will be kept apprised of your more inappropriate remarks, particularly, those on your blog. Juan Cole was denied tenure at Yale due to his own blog and, ultimately, left.

2.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 4:56 pm

That’s what Juan Cole said, too, prior to being passed over for tenure and forced to leave Yale because of inappropriate posts on his blog.

3.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 5:10 pm

That’s what Cole said, too … before finally being dismissed by Yale for remarks on his blog. He since moved to Michigan.

4.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 5:23 pm

Juan Cole certainly thinks so. The winters in Michigan are terribly cold for poor Juan. Losing tenure at Yale was a big disappointment. Pity he didn’t take me seriously at the outset.

I repeated at this point that she didn’t scare me a lick, but she insisted that she and Israel-First controlled things at Georgetown.

5.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 5:31 pm

My prayers are always answered. Especially, by the Jesuits at Georgetown.

Then Ms. King went on to infer that she and Israel-First’s money got me fired from the Jamestown Foundation. The following e-mails followed a note from me that said she was dreaming if she thought she had any influence at Jamestown.

1.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 5:56 pm Jamestown gladly accepts my largesse.

2.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 6:04 pm

Foundations rely on the kindness of philanthropists. But, you already know this.

3.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 6:15 pm

The Board at Jamestown thinks otherwise.

4.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 6:30 pm

I’ll be sure to say hi to Jim Burnley [I don’t know this name] on your behalf, next time.

I am fairly plain spoken, but this is pretty brazen stuff. Did Ms. King and Israel-First’s money really wreck Professor Cole’s career at Yale, and does their money control appointments and tenure at Georgetown. I guess we will have to wait and see.

I regret being quiet for so long. (I have the nerve to presume here, perhaps wrongly, that my silence was not welcomed.) Anyway, I have posted almost all of the comments in the que and will get to the rest this weekend.

So much has happened since I last wrote that I thought I would post a few bullet points and then follow-up next week with fuller pieces.

Here goes:

1. The death of Osama bin Laden is great news for the United States, and it is much better that he was killed rather than captured. The U.S. Navy Seals and the Intelligence Community — especially CIA — deserve high marks for their courage and accomplishments. Those entities clearly know they scored a terrific tactical victory that is a solid step on the road toward final victory. They also know their success did not yield anything close to final victory, notwithstanding the triumphalism of the pathetic young children and addled adults who were this week in the streets to celebrate bin Laden’s death. These are the same folks who, three years ago, formed the “non-partisan peace movement” and were in the same streets to protest the work of U.S. military personnel and CIA officers as that of murderers and torturers.
2. The political aftermath of our military success could have been handled better by the Marx Brothers than by the White House and the Republicans and Democrats in Congress. They have leaked very sensitive information for partisan purposes, and have made future military and intelligence operations in Pakistan more dangerous and difficult. And their story of the attack changed so often that some doubted the veracity of the claim that bin Laden is dead. We ended up in the absurd position of having al-Qaeda today confirm bin Laden’s death and thereby validate the accuracy of the U.S. government’s claims
3. As discussed here before, Pakistan’s interests and those of the United States in regard to Afghanistan, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda/bin Laden are not and have never been congruent, and U.S. politicians have known that since 9/11. This is a war that we will win or lose based on what we ourselves do. No proxy — not Pakistan, not Yemen, not any other country — is going to do our dirty work. Let us hope that Sunday’s killing of bin Laden is a sign that both parties are aspiring toward adulthood and henceforth will not delegate the protection of the United States to foreigners who sensibly have no intention of sacrificing their interests for ours.
4. Both houses of Congress are blowing hot air when it comes to the threat to cutoff aid to Pakistan. Why? Because we have given Pakistan the whip hand in the bilateral relationship. The reality is that our last two presidents and those popularly regarded as military geniuses — McChrystal and Petreaus — have marooned a 150,000 strong U.S.-NATO military force in Afghanistan. The supply needs of that force are absolutely dependent on Pakistan’s permission to use Karachi port to bring in supplies by ship and then unload and truck them through Pakistani territory to Afghanistan. We could not bring in enough supplies via cargo aircraft and the overland routes through the Former Soviet Union to Kabul are frequently closed by winter’s snow. Bottom line: U.S. aid must flow to Pakistan as long as the U.S.-NATO force is in Afghanistan — unless the Congress wants to see that force starve, lose mobility, and slowly run out of fuel and ammunition.

The announcement this week that British, Italian, and French military officers are being sent to “advise” the Libyan resistance expands NATO’s intervention in Libya and adds to the number of U.S., French, and British Special and intelligence forces already on the ground there. As well, the Obama administration’s decision to send military equipment worth $25 million to the resistance deepens U.S. involvement. The “just-protecting-civilians” and “no-boots-on-the-ground” mantras emanating from Washington and NATO capitals are quite simply lies.

This first small tranche of U.S.-NATO ground forces were sent to Libya to pinpoint targets for NATO air attack; size up the composition, attitudes, and talent of the anti-Gaddafi resistance; and find and prepare landing strips and assembly areas for Western troops. The just deployed British, Italian, and French officers will assess the work accomplished to date; provide general-staff-like direction for the resistance’s military operations; and prepare for an influx of U.S.-NATO troops if Washington and its allies lack the manliness to admit the intervention was a mistake, and instead continue what Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy have implicitly described as a crusade for democracy.

The slow, deliberate advance toward inserting substantial ground forces is hardly a surprise. Air power can win nothing by itself; Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy were surely told this by their military advisers before the intervention began. It also is clear that the citizenry that supports Gaddafi’s regime — for reasons of loyalty, self-interest, or fear — is as large or larger than that supporting the Libyan resistance. On this point, there is neither media reporting nor U.S. or NATO propaganda reporting any problems — sabotage, ambushes, assassinations, etc. — in the rear of Libyan regime forces as they push east toward Benghazi. If Libya was truly a nation-in-arms against Gaddafi, we surely would be seeing his forces’ rear areas plagued with hit-and-run attacks by resistance fighters.

So two months into the Libyan Democracy Crusade, Obama, Clinton, McCain, Graham, and their colleagues among Europe’s Knights Templar are where anyone with a lick of commonsense knew they would be once the decision to intervene was made. These great and worldly Wilsonian minds must soon decide whether to admit defeat and leave the Libyan resistance to its fate — the correct option — or authorize what will amount to a Western invasion of Libya to take power from Gaddafi and give it to a resistance based in the country’s most thoroughly Islamist and pro-mujahideen region. Odds are that they will do the latter because, as Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy wrote in an invasion-justifying article in the New York Times on 14 April 2011, “Britain, France, and the United States will not retreat until the United Nations Security Council resolutions have been implemented and the Libyan people can choose their own future.”

On the eve of a potential U.S.-NATO invasion, then, it is worth looking at the costs — beyond wasted funds — that this Libyan misadventure will impose on the United States and its allies. If Obama, et. al, make the right decision and abandon the Libyan resistance, the price will be high but tolerable. The Muslim world will claim the resistance was abandoned by an anti-Muslim West because it would increase the role of Islam in governing post-Gaddafi Libya — which it would. The UN also would be discredited, although for some this would be a net positive given that the UN’s founders never intended it to be the pivotal agent for destroying member states, as it has been so far in 2011 in Libya, Egypt, Ivory Coast, etc.

If, on the other hand, Obama and his brother democracy crusaders decide to invade Libya to fulfill a UN “mandate” to “protect innocent civilians,” the West’s self-imposed defeat and the costs attendant to it will be much greater. Why?

• There is no guarantee that the military forces of a U.S.-NATO-Libyan-mujahideen coalition can long survive as a functioning entity, let alone defeat Gaddafi. U.S.-led military coalitions are zero for three in winning interventions to date in Muslim lands — Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan — and the Islamist portion of the Libyan resistance will be as inclined to attack “crusader forces” as they are Gaddafi’s. The word quagmire is much overused, but this situation would surely merit that description.
• If a U.S.-NATO invasion defeats Gaddafi — then what? A stable democratic successor regime? An Islamic government? A combination of the two? Or a failed state? The last option probably is the most likely, which means either a long-term Western occupation — which would spur an Islamist insurgency — or a quick Western skedaddle which would leave Libya to the best organized portion of the resistance, the Islamists. (NB: Hows that for a lose-lose situation?)

Both of these bad options are in the future and so remain avoidable. But the West already has suffered an enormous loss by choosing to try to destroy Gaddafi’s regime, which the Wikileaks’ documents show was an anchor of the West’s counter-al-Qaeda efforts in the Maghreb. If Gaddafi survives, his regime will be hesitant — to say the least — to renew cooperation, and it will be weaker and facing a reinvigorated and now well-armed domestic Islamist opposition.

This, in turn, will mean Tripoli will have less control over its borders and so the movement of North African mujahideen into and out of Tunisia and Algeria will be much improved, causing increased trouble for the still inchoate regime in Tunis and the already-at-war-with-al-Qaeda regime in Algiers. Needless to say, reliable access to Algeria’s energy production is infinitely more important to the United States and its European allies than anything to be found in Libya.

The unnecessary Libyan intervention, then, is marching toward a disaster for the U.S. and NATO, as well as toward a triumph for the Islamist movement inspired and symbolized by bin Laden. There are absolutely no unintended consequences at play in the deteriorating situation. It is the direct and utterly predictable result of the daft, messianic Wilsonianism of Obama, Clinton, McCain, Graham, Sarkozy, and Cameron, leaders who, by intervening to install democracy, are on the verge of making the Maghreb and Egypt safe for the spread of Islamist militancy.

First, let me apologize for not responding to comments in the last week or more. I have been traveling and will be for the next week or ten days. When I get home, I will respond to all of you who have generously taken the time to comment.

This piece was published on the National Interest’s foreign-policy blog this week. I must say that it is amazing to see how many U.S. and European leaders, and how much of the media still believe and assert that affairs in the Arab world are moving toward democracy. As I have written here before, even without knowing much about Islam it seems at least counter-intuitive for so many Westerners to believe that in a time of uncertainty, turmoil, and violence, Arabs will turn toward a culture and political system many see as irreligious and even pagan, rather than the ideas, traditions, and lifestyle found in the faith they have practiced for more than 14 centuries. That so many respected Western politicians, journalists, and academics take this position strongly suggests that our educational system — even in its most prestigious institutions — has produced several generations of graduates who are ignorant of history and lack a basic ability to analyze events logically.

It also interesting to hear the U.S.-citizen, Israel-First gang cheering the destruction of the Arab tyrannies that have helped defend Israel’s borders for the last 35 years, as well as still calling for war with Iran, even as the growth of Sunni religious power across the Arab world further isolates, contains, and threatens the Shia regime in Tehran. As always, Israel’s worst and most lethal enemies are to be found among its war-mongering U.S.-citizen supporters.

Let us, for a moment, return to the golden days of yesteryear when Arab tyrants could keep order in their countries by simply killing their opponents in any number necessary to hold power. No Arab tyrant was better at this than the late Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad. President Assad’s standout power-keeping moment came in 1982 at the Syrian city of Hama when the Syrian army’s massed artillery made rubble of much of the city and killed 20,000 or so people in an operation meant to annihilate the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB). The Hama attack served Assad’s immediate goal, temporarily breaking the Brotherhood’s back and driving its survivors deep underground and into exile in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and elsewhere, where they licked their wounds and prepared for the future.

After the smoke settled at Hama, Assad decided to try to co-opt and moderate the remaining Islamists in an effort to keep the threat tamped down; create a “moderate” Islamic alternative to the extremists; and build support for and financial dependence on the regime among his just-defeated religious foes. Assad’s regime began to: build mosques by the thousands; establish higher-education religious schools dedicated to the study of the Koran, including “The Assad Institute for Memorizing the Koran”; host Islamic students from more than 50 foreign countries in Syria’s religious schools; and open Sharia schools for men and women across the country‘s rural areas.

As always happens in such co-option attempts, the Assads — father and then son, Bashar — have ended up riding the tiger. In 2004, for example, Bashar al-Assad’s government was asked by the SMB to grant amnesty to all its jailed members. The regime said no, but agreed to a case-by-case review of the prisoners. The result was that “hundreds of prisoners were released, almost all of them jailed for their alleged connection to Islamic movements.” And by 2005, the Western media was reporting that “a religious revival is sweeping Syria”; that Wahhabi Sunni Islam was gaining a foothold in the country; and that the number of women wearing the veil was growing quickly. Newspapers in the Levant also were commenting that “Islamism is growing in Syria, whether at the grassroots level of Damascene society or in the provinces of northern Syria.” One prescient Syrian publisher noted that the Islamists “are simply biding their time at this stage knowing that things will come their way, that their organizational skills will allow them to fill any gaps [if the Baathists fall]. They’re in no hurry. They’ve bided their time for decades, and they’re very patient.”

As this regime-induced growth in piety was picking up momentum, the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq and initiated a long war with Sunni mujahideen from Iraq and other Muslim countries. For the expatriate, Iraq-bound insurgents, Syria provided a key point of access to the war, and large numbers of fighters flowed across the Syrian border into Iraq. Syrian Islamist groups were intimately involved in making logistical arrangements to greet, house, and then insert the expatriates into Iraq. Initially, President Assad turned a blind eye to this process — which pleased the Syrian SMB — but then yielded to intense pressure from Washington and its allies and acted to better secure the border, slowing the arrival of foreign fighters in Iraq. By this action, Assad alienated Syrian Islamist leaders, and left numbers of foreign jihadis stuck in Syria.

Today’s bottom line, then, is that Syria has entered the so-called “Arab Spring” with a president who is not as fully in control of the country as was his father; who is dealing with Islamist leaders who are more powerful and popular than at any time since his dad tried to settle their hash at Hama; and who is under intense pressure to accommodate protestors’ demands from Western leaders, most of whom seem to have no clue that the change they want in Syria likely means the slaughter of al-Assad and his Alawite minority sect — about 10-percent of the population — and a greatly increased role for Islam in any post-Assad regime. As in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen, Washington, its allies, and the Western media are mindlessly opening the Syrian door not to democracy, but to the growth of Islamic militancy.

And if al-Assad is deposed, the lack of democracy in Syria will be the least of the West’s problems. The media and political leaders, each deathly afraid of even questioning the intent of anyone mouthing the word “democracy,” have made scarce mention of the fact that the one thing the Arab spring is unquestionably bringing is the destruction of Israel’s physical security, which has long depended on the maintenance of border-controlling tyrannies in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The end of Mubarak regime’s has made the Egypt-Gaza border more porous, and the elimination of Assad’s Baathist regime would weaken Syria’s willingness — and perhaps ability — to control its border with Israel. This would leave only Jordan, which is a far weaker regime than those in Egypt or Syria.

If the West’s mindless democracy mongering succeeds in helping to topple the three Levant tyrannies in favor of Islamist-influenced regimes, Israel will face greatly increased infiltration and rocket attacks from mujahideen in each country, a costly and bloody form of war-making for Israel to fight and for which its WMD deterrent is largely irrelevant. Perhaps most ironic is that major pro-Israel U.S. pundits — Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, Charles Krauthammer, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, and William Kristol, for example — have been shaking their pom-poms for the destruction of Arab tyrannies, an aspiration which, if attained, will — as did their support for destroying Saddam — put their signatures on Israel’s death warrant.

Published on The National Interest (nationalinterest.org)
Source URL (retrieved on Apr 13, 2011): https://nationalinterest.org/commentary/us-policy-in-levant-islamism-syria-ruin-israel-5138