The anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s demise, together with the president’s summary of the al-Qaeda kingpins taken out by Predator-drone targeted assassinations along the Pakistan-Afghan border — coupled with the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq, and the promised 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, against the backdrop of revolution and rebellions in North Africa and the end of the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan dictatorships — have created a sense in some administration circles that the “War on Terror” is over with.
So Michel Hirsh writes in National Journal:
“The war on terror is over,” one senior State Department official who works on Mideast issues told me. “Now that we have killed most of al Qaida, now that people have come to see legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone into al Qaida see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism.”
I am not sure at all that “we have killed most of al-Qaeda” or that would-be recruits in places like Yemen, Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait feel that they don’t have to go into al-Qaeda because a Mubarak or Qaddafi is gone, or that “legitimate Islamism” is itself a liberalizing influence.
In any case, the recent disclosure that an al-Qaeda operative plotted to bring down a U.S.-bound airliner from Yemen by a more sophisticated underwear bomb, and that there may be more like him makes that State Department figure’s assertion ridiculous. We can call these things “man-made disasters” and our efforts to thwart them “overseas contingency operations,” and we can forbid the use of “radical Islam” or just “Islam” to describe these killers, and we can hope that “moderate” Islamic governments will dispel radical Islamic influence, and we can brag about all the things we’ve done, but the fact remains that there are several thousands still out there who are 24/7 looking for ways to kill us, despite our euphemisms, outreach, and confidence that the “war” is over, if only because it is their pleasure to do so — as we are also reminded by the ongoing creepy trials in Guantanamo and by the Zazi subway would-be bomber in New York.