The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (11 page)

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu catalyzed the discussion of the historical origins of contemporary Islamist anti-Semitism in European Nazi and fascist regimes in the last century, which has produced some useful and thoughtful contributions, but in the process an important part of the story has gone lost. It’s the part of the story that deals with Husseini’s ties to Soviet Communism. Lenin and Stalin have somehow failed to claim their rightful places at the top of the pedestal of evil; Hitler’s got it all to himself. But in the case of Husseini, and indeed of jihadism more generally, any serious discussion must make room for the Communists. Listen to the late scholar Laurent Murawiec in his masterpiece
The Mind of Jihad
:

Starting in the 1920s and 1930s the Communist Party of Palestine (CPP) was the great instructor of the pan-Islamist nationalist movement led by the grand mufti Amin al Husseini in the fine arts of communist agitprop, the conveyor of crucial Marxist-Leninist concepts, such as “imperialism” and “colonialism.” It pioneered the application of European political categories to the Middle Eastern scene in general, and the Jewish-Arab conflict in particular. Most of the ugly repertoire of modern Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism came from the Soviet Union (with only the racial-biological component added by the Nazis). The CPP taught the Arab extremists the use of Bolshevik rhetorical devices previously unknown. The “anti-imperialism” so imported by the Communists was remarkably ingested by the Muslim extremists, to the point of becoming integral to their conceptions and expression. It merged with traditional jihadi views that animated the Arabs of the region. In the amalgamation of Bolshevism with jihad that turned out to be so crucial to modern jihad, this was crucial to training the Arabs in Soviet-style politics.
(Laurent Murawiec, The Mind of Jihad, p. 238)

As Murawiec’s last sentence suggests, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian leader learned a great deal about politics from the Kremlin, and he worked very closely with the Communists throughout his career. It wasn’t only the Nazis who inspired him; he was a true student of twentieth-century totalitarianism, and he created a toxic poison of Nazi racism—and its concrete application—and Soviet Communism. Both elements were later central to the Ayatollah Khomeini, who similarly combined German-style anti-Semitism with Soviet methods of organizing revolution. As Husseini worked with the Palestinian Communist Party to acquire and maintain power, so Khomeini worked with the Iranian Communist Party—Tudeh—to overthrow the shah and create the Islamist tyranny we see today.

There are many important lessons in the history of the evolution of the concept of jihad in the last century.

First of all, in the years prior to the beginning of World War II, would-be revolutionaries throughout the world often borrowed methods and doctrines from both Nazis and Communists. Don’t forget that Hitler and Stalin cooperated diplomatically and militarily to dismember Poland, and the Nazi-Communist alliance only ended with the German invasion of Russia.

Second, German and Soviet tyrannies had a lot in common, and radical Muslims freely picked elements from each in the creation of a jihadi ideology and the structure of Islamist states, whether the Islamic Republic of Iran or the current Islamic State.

Third, as in the case of Husseini, it is a mistake to look at Muslim tyrants as Middle Eastern versions of a specific Western dictatorship. They are attracted to, and inspired by, earlier totalitarian regimes.

Keep your eyes on that word “totalitarian.” That is the key concept.

This also helps clarify the nature of the global alliance we face. The countries and movements that are trying to destroy us have worldviews that may seem to be in violent conflict with one another. But they are united by their hatred of the democratic West and their conviction that dictatorship is superior. So while it may appear that, say, there is little in common between Communist North Korea and radical Shi’ite Iran, or between the leaders of the radical Sunni Islamic State’s “caliphate” and the Iranians, in fact it is no more difficult for them to cooperate in the war against us than it was for Hitler and Stalin to cooperate in the 1930s and 1940s.

Not that ideological differences are trivial. Ever since al Qaeda was smashed in Afghanistan in late 2001, al Qaeda leaders found haven in Iran. This meant that the world’s preeminent Sunni terrorist organization had an operational base within the world’s preeminent Shi’ite country. That relationship has always been strained, and top al Qaeda leaders have often chafed at having to submit to Iranian discipline. Sometimes bin Laden himself would erupt angrily at the Iranians. Yet, as we learned from documents captured when bin Laden was killed at his secret location in Pakistan in 2011, he received considerable assistance. At a minimum, the ability for al Qaeda terrorists to transit Iran was very useful.

The public would know a lot more about this complex relationship if the Obama administration would permit the publication of the (more than a million) documents seized by operatives of the Sensitive Site Exploitation team at bin Laden’s compound immediately following his death. That very important body of information constitutes what a senior U.S. military official calls “the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.”
(quoted by Thomas Joscelyn and Stephen Hayes,
www.wsj.com/articles/stephen-hayes-and-thomas-joscelyn-how-america-was-misled-on-al-qaedas-demise-1425600796
)

Disappointingly, only a couple dozen of those documents have been made public, and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s numerous summaries and analyses of the files remain classified. But even the public peek gives us considerable insight into the capabilities of this very dangerous global organization. One letter to bin Laden reveals that al Qaeda was working on chemical and biological weapons in Iran. Another document mentions negotiations with the government of Pakistan. Others provide details of operations under way in Africa, and still others speak of preparations for Mumbai-style attacks on European cities. Given the scale of ISIS-inspired or directed attacks we’ve seen in Europe, in the United States, and elsewhere around the world, I’d say we better smarten up and pay more attention to these and other Radical Islamist statements.

Our guys fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere badly wanted to know what we could learn from the bin Laden files, and in fact we learned a lot. Contrary to what the administration was saying at the time (during the 2012 election campaign between Obama and Mitt Romney), when the president and his supporters were assuring the American people that al Qaeda was broken and on the run, we learned that their strength had roughly doubled. We were still facing a growing al Qaeda threat. And it was not just in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. We saw it growing in Yemen. And we clearly saw it growing in East Africa and elsewhere across North and West Africa. The threat wasn’t going away, it was expanding.

The bin Laden documents also show that al Qaeda is extremely attentive to public opinion. Over and over, bin Laden condemns the bloody brutality of other radical Muslim organizations, and he is especially agitated by videos that show the terrorists killing other Muslims. Unlike the Islamic State, which used the videos to recruit thousands of new jihadis, al Qaeda strove to keep a low profile, counting on its doctrine and the effectiveness of its operations to expand. I certainly would not say that al Qaeda is a “moderate” organization. They intend to destroy us and their passion for a caliphate is no less intense than the Islamic State’s. While their ideology is the same, the two organizations have different tactics, and time will tell which of them has judged the situation more accurately.

As things stand, we can’t have a serious debate about the global war, because our own government won’t let the facts reach the American people. The story of the bin Laden documents is just one of many. Some of the information is classified, and properly so, although the current investigation into alleged suppression of intelligence from Afghanistan suggests that politics can trump technical requirements. If Joscelyn and Hayes are right, this is what took place regarding the squelching of the full al Qaeda story. I believe that even—maybe even especially—unhappy stories should be told. I think the American people, who are now called upon to make some terribly important electoral decisions, should have the full picture. For the most part, they are capable of understanding the realities of war, and why even the best military in the history of the world is bound to fail on occasion. In the coming years we’re going to have to fight several very tough enemies, and we’ll likely lose some of those battles.

Another dramatic example of this Radical Islamic expansion came in the fall of 2007. We witnessed al Qaeda training significant numbers of fighters inside Somalia. Through good intel collection, we watched two separate camps over a six-month period, training approximately 150 terrorists per camp. They had family members at the camp so we were restricted from destroying them, even though we watched their physical fitness training, religious training, and, in one case, their graduation ceremonies. At least a third of the approximately three hundred graduates were white Europeans and a couple of them came from the United States. One of the U.S. trainees actually conducted the first known suicide attack by an American, targeting U.S. forces near a military base in Djibouti.

These fighters weren’t part of the local fighting. They were destined for foreign operations. Some in this group of three hundred likely returned to Europe, to the battlefields of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world, some likely to Yemen.

Bottom line: al Qaeda got away with it. We allowed them to train their terrorists without destroying these camps. Why? Because of our high legal and moral standards in the rules of engagement. There were family members at these camps, there were “blinks” in our intelligence collection system (we could not get the requisite overhead support, whether satellites, drones, or aircraft, dedicated to this target area). It was all very frustrating. The war in Iraq was raging, things in Afghanistan weren’t going very well, and so we weren’t as effective as we should have been. Al Qaeda’s command and control was eluding us everywhere.

The situation in Iraq was unquestionably part of the reason we couldn’t get the detailed information we wanted. The support simply was not available. That’s the way life is, quite often. We were losing, General Petraeus was just kicking off his new Surge strategy, and violence levels in Iraq were the highest they had ever been. We needed to show success, and destroying a handful of al Qaeda trainers in a remote corner of the world wasn’t important enough.

It still makes me seethe, but this is what al Qaeda does so well. They recruit, find our weaknesses, and exploit them. They used an obscure location in the middle of nowhere in Somalia and trained three hundred operatives for external operations. My sense is that some of those terrorists are out in the world today as sleeper agents, or they are in leadership roles in the various theaters of operation where we currently see Radical Islamists fighting.

If the evidence we have about al Qaeda and other Radical Islamic terror organizations were presented publicly and forcefully, it would be easier for the American people to understand the nature of the war waged against us.

As Joscelyn and Hayes put it,

Making the documents public is long overdue. The information in them is directly relevant to many of the challenges we face today—from a nuclear deal with an Iranian regime that supports al Qaeda to the rise of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; from confidence-building measures meant to please the Afghan Taliban to the trustworthiness of senior Pakistani officials.

Choosing ignorance shouldn’t be an option.

The people would see that we are being attacked by a potent combination of countries and movements. A lot of people miss the key point that the terrorists are strong at least in part because they are getting help from the military and intelligence services of hostile countries. To be sure, the links between the terrorists and the sponsoring countries are sometimes complicated, and just as individual terrorists will cooperate with us for a while and then go back to their anti-American ways, so terrorist organizations will change their allegiance when it seems to their advantage.

People need to grasp that Radical Islam is not primarily about religion—it is about politics. Sharia is the basic legal system derived from the religious precepts of Islam, mainly the Koran and the hadiths (supposedly verbatim quotes of what the Prophet Muhammad said during his life). In its strictest definition, Sharia is considered the infallible law of God. They want to impose a worldwide system based on their version of Sharia law that denies freedoms of conscience, choices, and liberties. Basic freedoms! When one starts messing with freedom of conscience, one is not only violating the U.S. Constitution, but also denying a universal human right. I firmly believe that Radical Islam is a tribal cult and must be crushed. Critics get buried in the details of sunna, hadiths, the umma, and the musings of countless Muslim clerics and imams. These so-called Islamic scholars keep their message so complicated so as to create chaos, to confuse in order to control. Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mussolini were more transparent. Sharia is a violent law that is buried in barbaric convictions.

Perhaps the scariest part about this to a man who grew up in tiny Rhode Island is that the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) now says if we criticize the Prophet or Islam, we can be charged with blasphemy. That is like saying as a Roman Catholic (and a St. Mary’s School–educated Catholic at that), I cannot criticize the priests who rape and the cardinals and bishops who cover it up!

In a way, we are dealing with the same issues in Islam under Sharia law. The difference is that the Catholics in the United States did not want to apply canon law to the rest of society (although they tried to do this in select cases). Our legal leaders won by arguing that these were secular crimes in a secular world and canon law has no place in the legal process. Muslims want to apply Sharia law by using our own legal system to strengthen what many Americans believe to be a violent religious law that has no place in the United States.