The Long War

Why the war on Islamist terrorism is called the Long War by some. Deals simply cannot be made with these fanatics.

Military action, whether drone strikes on jihadis, bolstering allies who kill jihadis, or direct and extended combat against jihadis or states that support jihadis, is necessary; but it is not sufficient to win this Long War.

Truth be told, when we were hit on 9/11, with the wave apparently still rising, I was only thinking in military, diplomatic, and intelligence terms to hold the jihadis and their supporters at bay and to begin to roll them back, while we strengthened vigilance at home while we did that. I was thinking in terms of years rather than decades and generations for the bigger task of actually winning the Long War.

If we just think operationally, we can smash up the jihadis enough for long enough until the wave of jihad expends itself and wears out as past waves of jihadi impulses have waxed and waned.

But if we only do that, and think we are brilliantly practicing foreign policy realism by ignoring the source of that jihadi wave and making deals with autocrats to control their own jihadis, one day another wave will crest. And that wave might be in an era where technology of weapons of mass destruction has advanced enough to be easily acquired by private groups or even individuals.

So helping Moslems change and modernize Islam so that the religion rejects Islamism rather than incubates it is necessary. That's why I've long said that Iraq is more important to win than Afghanistan. Yes, 9/11 was spawned in Afghanistan. But Afghanistan is too peripheral to the Islamic world to really matter in the bigger struggle for the soul of Islam.

And Saudi Arabia is too important for other objectives (oil and resistance to Iran) to tackle directly even though it is the home to the version of Islam that generates jihadis.

So Iraq, a major Moslem nation in the heart of the Islamic world and which was already our enemy was the natural choice to be the lever to pry change out of the Arab Moslem world. People (still) opposed to the Iraq War also forget that Saddam himself had turned to Islamism to back his rule and could no longer be described as a "secular" dictator.

Just getting rid of Saddam was a victory in a narrow sense. But to make Iraq a victory in the wider war against Islamist ideology, we need Iraq to become a functioning democracy that offers an alternative to the traditional choices offered Arabs of being ruled by autocrats who support tame Islamism to bolster their own rule or theocracies that support wild Islamism to spread their ideology abroad.

This is why I wanted American troops to stay in Iraq after 2011. Our troops would have been a safety net to reassure Iraqi factions that they could keep their disputes within the political arena and not worry that another faction would use violence to get what they want. With that safety net in place, the habits of democracy could be developed.

And this is why I am not completely sour on the Arab Spring. These revolts against autocracy did not look to Islamism as the alternative. Sure, those asking for democracy didn't really understand it (but given time and American support, Iraq could provide that understanding), but the protesters didn't ask for pure Islam as the answer. That alone is a sign of some progress in setting the terms of the debate within Islam.

Islamists have taken advantage of the weakening of autocrats rather than seeing the Twittering classes achieve democracy. But this is a long war, remember. Keeping the autocrats in power was what strengthened Islamism in the past--in both the tame versions to bolster autocrats and wild versions in opposition to the autocrats.

So to get to a better place, the autocrats had to go. It may take decades or generations of stumbling progress complete with major steps backward in places--and the effort could ultimately fail, of course--but wrenching the Arab world away from autocrats who sought legitimacy from tame Islamism is the only way to move toward delegitimizing Islamism and replacing that ideology with democracy as a workable form of government in the Moslem world.

Other than from the sympathy of simple human decency at the sight of that misery, we wouldn't have to care about this transformation if the Islamists didn't view the West (and America, in particular) as the preferred target for their rage. Neither India, China, nor even Israel seems capable of taking our place as the all-powerful force that stands between their living in a cave and ruling the Ummah in style.