he first thing we can't not know is that our biggest enemy is jihadism, and he traces the now-familiar history leading up to 9/11: The West, tutored by a progressive view of history, read the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan as a victory for freedom. Jihadists read it as a victory for jihadism, a Phase One triumph in an ongoing war against the infidels. Phase Two, which jihadists imagined might be easier than Phase One, had the United States as its target. Attacks on American embassies in East Africa in the mid-1990s were intended to trigger a struggle in which the United States would be defeated as the Soviet Union was defeated in Phase One. When that didn’t work, jihadists blew a hole in the side of the U.S.S. Cole as it was refueling in the harbor at Aden. When that didn’t elicit the expected response, Osama bin Laden concluded that an outrage impossible for the Americans to ignore as required. Thus 9/11.Bin Laden's mistake was misreading American resolve. Weigel writes about Bernard Lewis' opinion that the wars in Afghanistan & Iraq changed the jihadist opinion of Americans; but the wars between Democrats & Bush might re-change them:
closely watching our politics and monitoring our national morale, jihadists like bin Laden may, Lewis suggests, be returning to their original assessment of American fecklessness – and may conclude “that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory.” A determination to make clear that this re-assessment is wrong ought to be the threshold test of seriousness applied to any presidential or congressional candidate in 2008. For, as Lewis concludes, if the jihadists’ reassessment is proven right, “the consequences – both for Islam and for America – will be deep, wide, and lasting.”That was September, and things look much better now inasmuch as everyone admits "the surge" has worked. However, the point stands: the jihadists will revert to their opinion about feckless Americans the instant our public debates and policies allow them to. Is it my imagination or does it seem as if the very success of the surge has made people talk less about foreign policy with respect to the presidential candidates?
Weigel concludes with some non-military things that need to be done against jihadism. Note the last item on his list...remember the prayers for the conversion of Russia?
we can’t not know that this long-term war against jihadism has to be fought on multiple fronts, many of them non-military. Interreligious dialogue is one such front. It ought to focus (as Benedict XVI suggested last December) on helping Islamic reformers assimilate the positive accomplishments of the Enlightenment – like the separation of religious and political authority in the modern state. Cleaning up our own cultural act is another, non-military front in this struggle: a country whose principal exports include pornography is not in a particularly strong moral position in a struggle against a religiously-shaped alternative vision of human goods.Prayer for the conversion of our enemies is yet another “front” in the war that has been declared upon us. Yet I’ve heard very few, if any, such prayers in the past six years. Their necessity is one more thing we can’t not know.
The Weedlets pray for that every night --the 7-year-old who wants to be a soldier never forgets that intention.
