Victory Is Ours!

Malte Lehming suggests that our wildest dreams have come true: 10 years after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the West has won the war against al-Qaida and militant Islam.

There has never been so much gnashing of teeth. Ten years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the bottom line reads as if al-Qaida had won: 6,000 U.S. soldiers killed in two meaningless wars; 140,000 civilian fatalities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan; nearly 8 million refugees in those countries; $4 trillion spent on war; Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib represent the end of our moral superiority just as the Patriot Act represents the end of our liberties and the lies about the Iraq War the final demise of our decency; the Norwegian Islamophobe Anders Behring Breivik drove religious and cultural antagonism to new heights; Osama bin Laden may be dead (for which there is no public proof), but his legacy is stronger than ever in the Yemeni terrorist training camps and in men’s minds.

High time, then, to remind people of the American sociologist and politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan who served no fewer than four U.S. presidents, from John F. Kennedy through Gerald Ford. He is the source of a most appropriate law that states, “The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.”

In other words, the amount of self-criticism in any given society is a good indication of its social constitutionality. The more the criticism, the better off the country is. Seen from that perspective, it may be readily argued that the amount of negativity stemming from 9/11 is an indication that it was not al-Qaida that won, but the West.

Osama bin Laden is dead; many of his deputies and others in the al-Qaida hierarchy were eliminated. The terrorists were driven out of Afghanistan, and even Pakistan is no longer the safe haven for them that it once was. The deployment of unmanned drones proved to be highly effective. Their intelligence gathering capabilities revealed attack plans early on, thereby preventing them from ever taking place.

An indication of al-Qaida’s defeat is its increasing internal aggression. Instead of attacking Western targets, the Islamists are increasingly attacking other Muslims. A number of those civilians killed in Afghanistan and Iraq died at the hands of their fellow Muslims. That decreases the attraction to their ideology. In the years following 9/11, that ideology was still universally dangerous; now it has become more cult-like.

Afghanistan was liberated from the Taliban, and Iraq from Saddam Hussein. Both countries now have relatively free elections. Have they become islands of democracy? By no means. But their examples, along with militant Islam’s decline, nurtured the thought in many Muslim minds that they could free themselves from the yoke of dictatorship and have a better future. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya: While the West supposedly compromised its morality with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and lies about Iraq, people in the Arabic-Islamic world pursued Western values as much as they sought NATO’s effectiveness. Between Tripoli and Cairo, people obviously understand that Abu Ghraib is to a genuine torture chamber as a nosebleed is to broken bones.

Were freedoms curtailed in Western nations by increased security measures? Air travel has become more cumbersome, a few more CCTV cameras are apparent in public areas, but daily life has scarcely changed. American Muslims weren’t rounded up en masse as Japanese-Americans were following Pearl Harbor, the event now remembered by a memorial near the U.S. Capitol. American Muslims actually enjoy more religious freedom than their European brethren.

What were Western goals subsequent to the terrorist attacks of 9/11? To neutralize al-Qaida, marginalize militant Islamists, begin introducing reforms into the Arab-Muslim world, prevent Iraq and Afghanistan from permanently dividing the nation and to remain a society with unified values. All of that has been achieved, even the most daring of expectations. Let the whiners continue to whine. They’re merely validating Moynihan’s Law.