FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS: Six years after 9/11, the evidence is mounting that we will lose the war on terror unless we change our policies radically and soon.
Sun Tzu teaches that to win a war, one must know who the enemy is. Paradoxical as it may sound in late 2007, there is no sound reason to believe that the Bush Administration knows who the enemy is, let alone how to go about defeating it.
Officially, we’re fighting a war against terror, but terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy, and one does not win wars by fighting tactics. Yet the enemy is very real and formidable. Armed with a murderous ideology, it has a worldwide support and recruitment infrastructure, virtually unlimited financing, and single-minded commitment to the destruction of our civilization. Whether we call it Islamism, radical Islam or Islamofascism, it is an aggressive and violent millenarian movement no less reactionary and dangerous than its totalitarian predecessors Nazism and Communism. While this reality is occasionally admitted, not once has Washington “fessed up” to the fact that the threat we are currently facing would have never reached the critical levels it has without nearly thirty years of massive ideological, financial and operational sponsorship by the three pillars of Islamic extremism – Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran.
Saudi Arabia, by spending untold billions for the export of its hateful Wahhabi creed and building the infrastructures of Islamism worldwide; Pakistan, by serving as the world’s largest breeding grounds of Islamic terrorists with the full knowledge of its military and intelligence services; Iran, by openly and aggressively supporting terrorism everywhere even as it seeks to become a nuclear power.
This disastrous state of affairs that the Bush Administration stubbornly refuses to acknowledge was again demonstrated last week in the failed German terrorist plot against U.S. military facilities. According to German government sources, the conspirators were radicalized to the point of planning mass murder in the Wahhabi-controlled “Multicultural House” and the Islamic Information Center in Ulm, and received terrorist training in Pakistan in 2006 – five years after Pakistan, alongside Saudi Arabia, became our “strategic allies” in the war against terror.
The results of Washington’s egregious strategic myopia are clear for everyone to see. We have allowed Iran, which is now directly involved in killing our soldiers, and Saudi Arabia, which provides 50% of the suicide bombers in Iraq, to systematically undermine our efforts there with impunity, making it highly unlikely that the current successes in the surge campaign will last. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has received a new lease on life thanks to unimpeded access and supplies from across the border in the Northwest Frontier Province, which has itself become Talibanized on Musharaf’s watch, and countless Jihadi training camps are again open for business as in the good old pre-9/11 days. Throw in the huge strides the Islamists have made in places like Turkey, Nigeria, Thailand and in the rapidly growing Muslim communities in Europe and the United States, and there is little reason to be sanguine about the Bush Administration’s legacy on national security.
If there is a bright side to this somber picture, it would be the realization that if our president for the past seven years had been named Gore or Kerry we would have very likely already implemented the preemptive surrender option their democratic colleagues in Congress are clamoring for. It is a very small consolation.
- FSM Contributing Editor Alex Alexiev is co-executive producer of Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center and a partner with Martyn Burke and Frank Gaffney in ABG Films Inc. [Source: Bush has Failed By Alex Alexiev]
Mark Alexander
