The Fate of America, the Islamists and Terrorism

In 2009, just a short time after Barack Obama became president of the United States, Newsweek magazine, known for its aggression in discussing American foreign policy, came out with a provocative cover, which we’ve discussed previously.

The cover page was green — the color of Islam in Western imagination — and on it was written in huge letters “Radical Islam Is a Fact of Life. How To Live with It.” The sentence was written in Arabic, though the magazine is published in English.

This issue of the magazine discussed a variety of ways in which American policy under Obama changed from a policy of direct confrontation of terrorism to one of taking a multifaceted approach to containing terrorism, even if that meant exercising greater flexibility. The question of how to live with radical Islam, though, answered itself. Perhaps it can be summed up by saying that Obama’s Democratic administration has reinstated the doctrine previously employed during the time of Bill Clinton, referred to then as the policy of “dual containment,” which meant sanctioning the “rogue nations”—the mullahs’ Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—weakening the countries by pitting the two against each other and by pitting them both against the surrounding region, the world and the global economy.

Obama, however, with his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has applied dual containment not merely to two countries, but to two whole axes: on the one hand, the Khamenei-Maliki-Assad axis, and on the other, the al-Qaida and affiliates axis. So the key to “living with radical Islam,” as Newsweek put it, has become clear with the passing of time: Do what’s necessary to drain the region so that its people live with constant conflict and bloodshed, and rob its wealth through corruption, smuggling and bribery. This, I do say, is a smart position: It requires no material or human sacrifice from external agents. It merely requires exploiting the deep storehouses of violence among the peoples of the region — directing that violence inward and not outward.

Those living in the region vainly attempt to deal with this trap, claiming takfirism and jihadism for any position that doesn’t coincide with theirs. But the big difference is that these societies, burning in the fires of terrorism and trying to cope, work with what they know and only end up fueling terrorism. All their institutions, education programs, media campaigns and sermons in the mosques deride them. What’s painful to see is that their capability for creating terrorism is much greater than their capability to control it — it is nothing more than “Kafka-ism,” absurdism, a term for something that is created and then fought against.

“Nonradical” Islamists are part of this general scene; they are both truthful and deceptive in their condemnation of violence and terrorism. They are truthful in that they themselves don’t practice violence, but they are deceptive in that they have paved the way for all the justifications that are used to defend it: For who is it that spreads the takfiri ideology of Maududi and Sayyid Qutb in every house? And who is it that spreads the idea that political work is a strike of jihad? And who is it that encourages youth to engage in combat sports? And who is it that worked for decades to weaken the link between what is said in society and what is said by the sheikh? And who is it that spreads doubt as to the legitimacy of the nation state, with delusions of reviving the caliphate? They have prepared the conditions for violence and terrorism, but they take up a position of indebtedness to radicals and terrorists.

Perhaps in recent events we find a new manifestation of this contradiction in the positions of the “nonradicals,” which inevitably flows into the interests of the radicals. For when the Libyan military leader Khalifa Haftar faced armed extremist groups, the “nonradicals” hurled condemnation at him. If Libya had been a stable country, Haftar would not have received condemnation for his initiative. But everyone knows that Libya is a chaotic mess of rival militias with daily kidnappings of civilians and millions of weapon parts sold in the streets. Everyone knows that, since Qaddafi’s fall, the armed jihadi groups have been spreading and taking control of cities, countryside and desert areas in Libya. The “nonradical” Islamists have prepared the appropriate climate for this sweep by preventing Mahmoud Jibril from ascending to the head of the government, even though he received a majority of the votes in the 2012 election. They then used the Political Isolation Law of 2013 to exclude moderate politicians who were actually able to lead the country. Today, in Libya and everywhere else, they have their mouthpieces of propaganda, they shed crocodile tears for the law being profaned in Libya — as if such a country has room to speak of lawfulness — and they emotionally protest the civilian casualties of the clashes, as if they don’t know how many Libyans in the past two years have been victims of militia control, or of the daily kidnappings of women, or of the powerlessness of the law everywhere.

When it comes to terrorism, the link between America and the “nonradical” Islamists is that they both think they are able to profit from this terrorism. America exploits it in order to make the Middle East dependent on American supervision, protection and presence. The Islamists come across as moderate compared to the extremists, standing for the most appropriate and realistic solutions in the region, but they do not accept modern solutions for citizenship-based coexistence.

If we look at the events of the past few years, it is confirmed day after day that terrorism is stronger than any force that thinks itself able to use terrorism for its own ends; it will surpass all and free itself from every chain and fetter, for it is a blind and intractable force. Therefore, we say again: No security policy against terrorism will be successful unless it watches over its entry points, deals with its results and addresses its causes, unless the point is to become further entrenched in an expectation of exploiting terrorism for profit.