Years ago I read a series of Peanuts cartoons in which Lucy is
teaching her younger brother Linus the etymology of plant names:
“The palm tree got its name because the average person can put his
palm all the way round the tree trunk,” she says. Charlie Brown,
listening to Lucy’s absurd comments from a distance, becomes so
agitated that his stomach begins to ache.
Like poor old wishy-washy Charlie Brown, I feel nauseated when
pundits charge that Islamism began — or, alternatively,
accelerated — with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. I always
suspected that Lucy — in her typical ornery fashion — was
purposely spreading misinformation. I’m less suspicious when it
comes to the masterminds behind the partially released National
Intelligence Estimate’s “classified” document, a study that
reportedly makes the case that the Iraq War is fueling terror,
which is like making the case for oxygen. Our spooks are damn
efficient when it comes to discovering the blinding obvious.
They’re less effective doing, well, clandestine intelligence
work.
The War in Iraq serves rather effectively as terror’s
all-purpose fall guy and universal scapegoat, though in reality
pretty much everything the West does can be blamed for increasing
the threat of Islamic terror. These days it’s easier to give
offense to a fundamentalist Muslim than it is to a bi-polar Mafia
don. Indeed, today’s Islamists make Tommy De Vito (the Joe Pesci
character in Goodfellas) look positively mellow.
A more accurate New York Times’ headline would have
read: “Iraq War among many, many factors fueling terror.” What had
the Danish cartoon riots to do with the Iraq War? Filmmaker Theo
van Gogh was not butchered and Dutch Parliamentarian Aayan Hirsi
Ali forced into hiding because the U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein.
Van Gogh was murdered because his 11-minute film
Submission was an insult — not so much to good taste and
the art of cinematography, though it was that too — but to Islam.
Certainly, the 9/11 hijackers did not pilot jets into skyscrapers
and government buildings because they foresaw the Iraq War in a
visionary dream. Osama bin Laden ordered the murdering of
innocents, mainly because of the first Gulf War, the sanctions on
Iraq, and the U.S. troops that remained behind polluting the sands
of the “Land of the Two Mosques” (Saudi Arabia). Similarly, al
Qaeda had been rehearsing for its big London gig for nearly a
decade before the subway attacks on 7/7. And I’m still waiting to
hear from someone — anyone — who can come up with one good link
between the recent Hezbollah-Israeli conflict and the Iraq War.
IN TODAY’S HYPER news cycle it’s easy to forget what we knew just a
few short years ago. A December 2002 poll conducted for the BBC
found that 44 percent of British Muslims believed al Qaeda’s
attacks on 9/11 were a justified response to “American aggression.”
Following the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Talibanistan, 70
percent of British Muslims maintained the U.S. and the UK had
“declared war on Islam.”
We’re talking about an alleged “American aggression” that
commenced long before the Iraq invasion, mind you. To the Islamist
mindset American aggression might mean halting the rape of Kuwait
by Saddam’s Republican Guard, or protecting the Kurds from
retaliation by instituting a no-fly zone over Kurdistan.
Aggression, too, is when your government does not favor the
Hamas-governed Palestinians over the Israeli state. The A-word
being the operative one because, according to the Muslim holy book,
“aggression” justifies holy war.
At most the War in Iraq has sped up the process of Islamic
radicalization begun in the early 20th century with the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Brothers Qutb (Sayyid and bin Laden’s mentor
Mohammed). Like many of today’s British Muslims, Sayyid Qutb
believed that the West was waging war against Islam, and the only
way to defeat the Crusaders was to return to 7th-century Islam, a
time when mighty Muslim armies were on the march conquering large
swaths of the Persian, Roman, and Byzantine empires. The one bright
spot in the intelligence report suggests that terrorist recruitment
can be halted, even reversed, by putting an end to the insurgency.
But that will take a commitment of troops and resources from the
Bush Administration that we have yet — and I for one don’t expect
— to see.
On the way into work Monday I heard former chairman of the
National Intelligence Council Robert Hutchings complain to an NPR
reporter that the U.S. was “prosecuting the war on terror in a
military way.” Only some fancy wheel-work kept me from driving
straight into an overpass. However, after that near-death
experience everything became suddenly clear. No wonder the
intelligence report’s findings were so bleak. We’re going about
this war-thing all wrong. Beat them swords into ploughshares, boys,
and send them off to developing countries where they can be melted
down to make…well, third-rate, third-world swords.
If this is what passes for American “intelligence,” President
Bush might want to consider modifying his education program’s
slogan from “No Child Left Behind” to “No Child Left.”
