How Bush’s democracy delusion plays into Al Qaeda’s emerging strategy

The Mahdi from west Texas keeps telling us that the key to our safety is the desire of a billion Muslims for liberal-style freedom. This desire is, indeed, so well hidden that we could think of it as Neocon America’s own Hidden Imam, which, when it finally reveals itself, will fulfill the true purpose of the world and bring about the End of History. Meanwhile, strategists on the other side of this one-sided war (they actually are at war with us, while we only pretend to be at war with them) understand how our emphasis on democracy can help them advance their war aims. A European reader living in New York City sent me these passages from Lawrence Wright’s article in the September 11, 2006 New Yorker, “The Master Plan: For the new theorists of jihad, Al Qaeda is just the beginning”:

In Suri’s view, the underground terrorist movement—that is, Al Qaeda and its sleeper cells—is defunct. This approach was “a failure on all fronts,” because of its inability to achieve military victory or to rally the Muslim people to its cause. He proposes that the next stage of jihad will be characterized by terrorism created by individuals or small autonomous groups (what he terms “leaderless resistance”), which will wear down the enemy and prepare the ground for the far more ambitious aim of waging war on “open fronts”—an outright struggle for territory. He explains, “Without confrontation in the field and seizing control of the land, we cannot establish a state, which is the strategic goal of the resistance.”…
He questions Al Qaeda’s opposition to democracy, which offers radical Islamists an opportunity to “secretly use this comfortable and relaxed atmosphere to spread out, reorganize their ranks, and acquire broader public bases.” In many Arabic states, there is a predictable cycle of official tolerance and savage repression, which can work in favor of the Islamists. If the Islamists “open the way for political moderation,” Suri writes, they will “stretch out horizontally along the base and spread. So they once again exterminate and jihad grows yet again! So then they try to open things up once again, and Islam stretches out and expands again!”

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Paul K. writes:

“He proposes that the next stage of jihad will be characterized by terrorism created by individuals or small autonomous groups (what he terms ‘leaderless resistance’)…”

It’s good to know that Americans no longer face the threat of terrorism from the Muslims in our midst. No matter how many victims of “leaderless resistance” pile up, the F.B.I. will continue to reassure us that this does not meet their definition of terrorism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 14, 2006 01:45 PM | Send