Keeping Guards Up
Don’t give up on war.

December 10, 2001 10:55 a.m.

merica this week faces the subtlest of threats. The apparent ease of its victory in Afghanistan may restore the false sense of invulnerability that pervaded the nation until the hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center. If in addition Osama bin Laden is captured, killed, or credibly reported to have perished in his upholstered cave, then Americans may conclude that the war on terrorism has been won and that normalcy, shopping, a feckless foreign policy, multiculturalism, insecure borders, and MTV can resume as before.

If that happens, it will not signify that the war against terrorism is over — merely that we have stopped fighting it. Consider how much will not have been changed by the fall of Kandahar and the deaths of bin Laden and Mullah Omar. An estimated 35,000 members of the al Qaeda network will remain at large. Wealthy Saudis and others in the Gulf will continue to finance anti-American fanaticism in religious schools, radical mosques, and terrorist training camps across the Muslim world. Millions of young Muslim men, growing up in societies that cannot provide work for their rapidly growing numbers, will yearn to avenge bin Laden; and several Muslim regimes will continue to harbor, assist, and train al Qaeda.

For the inconvenient fact is that Osama bin Laden and his brand of radical Islam represent a mass movement in the Arab world. It will be finally eradicated when more tolerant and realistic forms of Islam decisively defeat it within Islam, just as liberal democratic Christian humanism defeated Nazism and Communism within the West.

But because radical Islamism is an "armed doctrine," in Burke's phrase, it must first be defeated on the battlefield. Only such a defeat will open the minds and hearts of all Muslims to alternatives within Islam. That defeat can be accomplished only by the U.S. and its allies — including, ideally, some inevitably nervous Muslim allies.

Hence the furious discussion, inside and outside the U.S. government, of overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Admittedly, that will not necessarily be the next step in America's war on terrorism. There is a reasonable argument that once Afghanistan has been secured, the U.S. should take on "softer" terrorist targets such as the Islamic terrorist enclaves in the Philippines.

But Saddam's arsenal of mass destruction is growing more formidable daily. And we know enough of his intense personal pride and ruthlessness to suspect that he would prefer to douse the Middle East in flames rather than yield to any member of the Bush family. Within the next two years, therefore, we must either overthrow Saddam or risk both his obtaining nuclear invulnerability and financing a string of terrorist successes.

Writing in the current National Interest, former Defense Secretary and CIA Director James Schlesinger lists the real difficulties of mounting an invasion of Iraq. It would require land bases which even loyal U.S. allies like Turkey might be reluctant to provide; and it might weaken moderate Muslim regimes before the radical ones and thus undermine America's strategic position in the Middle East. These are formidable objections. Schlesinger raises them to point the firm moral that if any such action is attempted, it must be absolutely assured of success. There can be no Bay of Pigs.

Even if the U.S. employs Iraqi opposition forces against Saddam as it has successfully employed the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, it must be ready to supplement these forces with its own overwhelming might at the first sign that Saddam's soldiers are holding their ground. America's soldiers must be in the region in sufficient numbers to roll over Saddam — along with utterly reliable allies like the Brits, the Aussies and the Turks. More nervous allies from the Muslim world should be held back for the victory parade.

Their presence there, however, will be vital. For, aside from battlefield valor, two types of morale will finally win the war on terrorism. The first is the fragility of totalitarian regimes like Saddam's Baath Socialist regime that govern by fear. As soon as U.S. or allied tanks are seen on the outskirts of Baghdad, its rejoicing will equal that of Kabul.

The second factor is the infectious intoxication of success. After all, Muslim countries have been susceptible to the appeal of radical Islam in part because their recent history has been one of humiliating failure while the West has prospered.

Once Saddam and bin Laden perish, their ideologies will join earlier failures like Nasserism, as roads to nowhere. So Muslims should be among the victorious being cheered — and not only soldiers in the parade but also Muslim statesmen, writers, businessmen and clerics who together must pioneer a liberal Islam which enables Muslims first to prosper and then to govern themselves democratically as full members of the modern world.

Which means that the West, instead of simply clinging to despotic regimes because they are convenient, must help the Muslim world toward a more liberal and, eventually, democratic future.