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Authors: Lieutenant General (Ret.) Michael T. Flynn,Michael Ledeen

The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (10 page)

BOOK: The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies
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In like manner, in today’s Third World, Obama has shown great sympathy for anti-American “revolutionaries,” and abandoned friendly tyrannies such as Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and Zine Ben Ali’s Tunisia. And just as Carter was reluctant to challenge Communist control in the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Nicaragua, so Obama has been reluctant to support the domestic opponents of Islamist regimes in Damascus and Tehran. One of the best short summaries of the dangerous foolishness of Obama’s foreign policy goes like this:

Inconsistencies are a familiar part of politics in most societies. Usually, however, governments behave hypocritically when their principles conflict with the national interest. What makes the inconsistencies of the Obama administration noteworthy are, first, the administration’s moralism, which renders it especially vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy; and, second, the administration’s predilection for policies that violate the strategic and economic interests of the United States. The administration’s conception of national interest borders on doublethink: it finds friendly powers to be guilty representatives of the status quo and views the triumph of unfriendly groups as beneficial to America’s “true interests.”

I have made one change in the original text above. I inserted “Obama” in place of “Carter.” The paragraph comes from Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick’s essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which appeared in
Commentary
magazine in November 1979. The name change demonstrates how the two worst presidents we’ve ever elected act so similarly.

Ambassador Kirkpatrick’s critique of Carter applies in equal measure to Obama. Like Carter, President Obama is vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy (if it was right to intervene in Libya, why not in Syria and Iran, two regimes that kill Americans in addition to slaughtering their own?), and there is an additional convergence: both American presidents have instinctive sympathy, even enthusiasm, for self-proclaimed anti-American “revolutionaries.” Here’s Ambassador Kirkpatrick again:

A posture of continuous self-abasement and apology vis-a-vis the Third World is neither morally necessary nor politically appropriate. No more is it necessary or appropriate to support vocal enemies of the United States because they invoke the rhetoric of popular liberation.… Liberal idealism need not be identical with masochism, and need not be incompatible with the defense of freedom and the national interest.

Indeed, if you’re really interested in advancing freedom (which I fervently believe is in our American national interest), you should fight against our vocal enemies. They invariably turn out to be real enemies and will translate their words into terrorists, guns, and weapons of mass destruction as soon as they have a chance. Obama has done his damnedest to forge alliances with Hugo Chavez, before his death, the Castro brothers, and Ali Khamenei, but they and their cronies have all responded by redoubling their efforts to defeat us.

Both presidents displayed a curious sympathy with our enemies. Carter told the dictator of Poland that he had not given up on bringing the Communist “back to Christianity,” and Obama has striven mightily to cut deals with the Iranians, Cubans, and other Latin American radicals who have joined the enemy alliance.

As with twentieth-century Fascist and Communist totalitarian regimes, the current crop of Islamist and secular totalitarian regimes in the Middle East say what they mean, and act on it.

What works? Ironically, Ronald Reagan proved to be the true revolutionary. While liberals like Carter invited the success of radicals who installed totalitarian regimes, Reagan supported democratic forces in both friendly and unfriendly tyrannies, from the Soviet Union to Argentina. Reagan knew what both Carter and now Obama reject: that America is the one truly revolutionary country in the world, and part of our national mission is to support democratic revolutionaries against their oppressors.

Late in the third year of his presidency, Jimmy Carter had an epiphany when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. At which point, fear of Communism was no longer irrational in his eyes. He began the expansion of our military budget that ultimately made the United States so powerful that the gray men in the Kremlin did not dare to lash out at us when the bell tolled for the Soviet Empire.

Obama (and our country) is now at a similar historic juncture. Does he now see the urgency of responding to the anti-American tyrants in Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and Syria? Will he support their opponents? Will he ever come to grips with the likes of Radical Islamism and its allies? Not bloody likely!

Secular Radicals, Jihadi Radicals

On the face of it, the alliance between Russia and Iran is surprising. No doubt Vladimir Putin remembers that the Ayatollah Khomeini called upon Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev to convert to Islam, and Putin knows well that the Iranians sent thousands of Korans and many radical imams into the Muslim regions of the USSR. Putin himself waged a bloody battle against Radical Islamists in Chechnya, and they, too, had links to Iran.

It seems very unlikely that Putin is pleased by the thought of a fanatical Muslim state virtually on his borders. One of the wisest analysts of Putin’s thinking, Walter Laqueur, notes in his book
Putinism
that “it is difficult to assess the prospects of the militant Islamic movement, because most of their activities take place underground. It seems probable that at least some of the militants of the Afghan war will invade the Central Asian republics.” He adds that Putin is reluctant (to fully integrate countries like) Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan into the Russian Federation, preferring governments with limited independence. Laqueur judges it is likely that “parts of Central Asia will remain danger zones.” These are areas where the Iranians have been actively sponsoring Shi’ite radicalism.

These are very serious concerns, yet Putin has done a lot for the Khamenei regime. Russian involvement in Persian affairs goes back centuries, and I have pointed out that there are very close working relations between the two countries, the most spectacular example being the Iranian nuclear program. The nuclear reactor at Bushehr is a Russian product, as will be the next two reactors. Iran has contracted for billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment, as well as very good Russian antiaircraft missiles, the infamous S–300s. Finally, there is no denying the fact that the two are fighting side by side in Syria trying to save the regime of their mutual ally, Bashar al-Assad.

How does one explain this superficially unlikely partnership? In part, it’s the old nostrum: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Putin has declared the United States (and NATO generally) to be a national security threat to Russia, and “Death to America” is the official chant of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Both the Putinists and the radical Iranian Muslims agree on the identity of their main enemy. Hence, one part of the answer is surely that their alliance is simply the logical outgrowth of their hostility toward America. Certainly it would be a mistake to describe the relationship as a warm embrace; there is precious little trust between the two, and if they fail to win in Syria, we can expect to hear some very nasty rhetoric coming out of Moscow and Tehran.

Is this, then, simply an alliance of convenience? Is it to be explained by one of the hard rules of geopolitics—the existence of a common enemy? And does this account for the global alliance, from Pyongyang to Havana? What about the presence of ISIS and al Qaeda in the alliance? I don’t believe it is.

The Russians and Iranians have more in common than a shared enemy. There is also a shared contempt for democracy and an agreement—by all the members of the enemy alliance—that dictatorship is a superior way to run a country, an empire, or a caliphate. There are certainly differences between the religious and secular tyrannies—the importance of Sharia law to the jihadis is perhaps the most significant—but both seek, and fight for, an all-powerful leader.

Recent public opinion polls in Russia show that the great majority of young people believe “there was a national leader deciding all important political issues concerning the presence in the future of their country; the rest of the people had no influence on this, and there was no reason to change this state of affairs.” The dividing line between religious and secular tyranny is often fuzzy, and, except for the Communist regimes in North Korea and Cuba, none of our enemies accepts the notion of separation of church (or mosque) and state. The Russian Orthodox Church is now far more powerful than it was during the Communist years, and, contrary to conventional wisdom, Radical Islam played a major role in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq long before our arrival in 2003.

Religious convictions are far more potent in recruiting followers, whether by mass movements or nominally secular regimes, than intellectual tracts or legalistic documents. Religion provides believers with the meaning of life; even the mightiest of dictators can’t do that. This is nowhere better demonstrated than in the history of the Islamic State, which was spawned by Saddam Hussein himself.

It was long said that Baathism, the official doctrine of Saddam in Iraq and the Assads in Syria, was an Arab secular socialism. It was proclaimed during the seizure of power in both countries, and was often cited as the ideological basis for their close ties with the Soviet Union. Based as it was on the Soviet model, Baathism was an effective system for tyrannical rule, but it did not inspire the people. During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, the “godless” nature of Saddam’s regime was a centerpiece of Iranian propaganda, and it was quite effective. As a result, Saddam made a basic change in his foreign policy in the summer of 1986, when the Iraqi Politburo (Pan-Arab Command) decided to support foreign “religious currents.”

This led to Iraqi support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for the radical regime of Hassan al-Turabi in Sudan, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and eventually for al Qaeda. Within Iraq, the Baathist regime starting funding (mostly Sunni but sometimes Shi’ite) mosques and imams. When Baath Party founder Michel Aflaq, a Christian atheist, died in 1989, official eulogies claimed he had converted to Islam. In November of that year, the Saddam University for Islamic Studies opened its doors in Baghdad, the Koran had become required reading (even in official party headquarters), and four years later Saddam announced a full-fledged Faith Campaign.

We’re talking 1993, ten years before the U.S. invasion. From then on, the ruling Iraqi elite became increasingly Islamized, so that when the insurrection was organized to fight us and our allies, it was largely led by men who had received two kinds of professional and ideological preparation. As officials of the Baathist state—particularly from the intelligence and counterintelligence branches—they had undergone training by the intelligence organizations of the Soviet Empire. Kyle Orton, Middle East analyst and blogger, and others rightly stress that “All of the leaders of ISIS’s Military Council, its most important institution, have since 2010 been [former regime officials].”
(
https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/the-islamic-state-was-coming-without-the-invasion-of-iraq/
)

These men had also received religious indoctrination, and, by 2003 the main precursor of ISIS (the small but growing organization led by Zarqawi) had established religious requirements for new members; they had to pass an entrance examination.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the driving force. He arrived in Baghdad in May 2002 with other top al Qaeda figures. He moved around the country, recruiting individuals such as Aleppo-based Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s powerful official spokesman, and setting up the ratlines through Syria that would bring the foreign fighters to the Islamic State’s predecessor (al Qaeda in Iraq). The Assad regime was complicit in Zarqawi’s actions at this time, too, not only in forming the networks that brought the foreign fighters to the Islamic State but in the assassination of USAID worker Laurence Foley in Amman, Jordan. In November 2002, Zarqawi again returned to Iraq and took up residence in Ansar al-Islam–controlled territory, an Iranian proxy. Zarqawi and his band of Ansar fighters fled to Iran during the initial stages of the 2003 U.S. invasion. From interrogations conducted during our operations in Iraq, we learned that for a short period in the spring of 2003, Zarqawi was “detained” by Iran and then subsequently released. While there is little information as to why they detained him, one can only speculate that Iran likely worked with and advised Zarqawi on his future plans for taking over Iraq.

In Saddam’s case, he had brought thousands of foreign fighters into Iraq, many through state-directed mosques which were connected to international Islamist networks, and these fighters, under the command of the heavily radicalized loyalist militia, the Fedayeen Saddam, were almost the only resistance against the Coalition invasion.

The war in Iraq foreshadowed the alliance against us, and showed that secular and religious forces, movements, and countries could join forces. Notice again, for example, that Zarqawi went from Iraq to Iran at the start of the war, and then returned. There was no love lost between Saddam and the Iranians, and Zarqawi was not an Iraqi instrument by any means, but both regimes helped him.

The interplay between religion and pure power is also on display in some of the captured ISIS documents published in the Western press. German analysts have been struck by the striking similarity between ISIS bureaucracy—especially when it comes to spying on their own residents—and the notorious Stasi system of control in Communist East Germany (Stasi was the intelligence arm of the former East German regime under Soviet Communist dictatorship). No surprise here; since so many of the top officials of the Islamic State came from Saddam’s regime (most of whom were trained by Communists), it was only to be expected that their Sharia-based caliphate would resemble the Soviet bloc.

Thus, religious fanatics and secular tyrants work quite well together, transcending even deep ideological divides. The most dramatic example comes from the infamous case of the grand mufti of Jerusalem in the 1930s and 1940s, Amin al-Husseini, and his efforts to forge an operational relationship between Nazi Germany and his own Muslim Brotherhood.

BOOK: The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies
7.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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