It was not so long ago that we were regularly treated to stories purporting to show that the Democrats/Liberals appreciated complexity, while the Republicans/Conservatives generally supported overly simplistic narratives that failed to do justice to the complexity of reality. Further, it was those who understood nuance who were best positioned to understand how to use the levers of power to improve the lives of most Americans. It was never a particularly convincing story line but it did contain a kernel of truth. The sad fact is that both left and right have a tendency to over-simplify; they just over-simplify using different memes.
Peter Beinart attempts to address this tendency to reductionism and in his article, proves the point, though perhaps not as he intends:
Obama Outsmarts the Terrorists
Which brings us to Barack Obama’s “war on terror.” Conservatives keep saying that Obama doesn’t really believe we’re at war; that he sees terrorists as mere criminals, not the epic evil-doers that they really are. But here’s the irony: It’s precisely because he doesn’t see the terrorist threat as quite so epic that al Qaeda is falling apart.
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At the end of the day, all jihadist terrorists can really do is kill. But the more they kill, the more they alienate their fellow Muslims. As the French scholar Gilles Kepel has pointed out, the reason jihadists turned their attention to the United States in the first place was because they utterly failed in the 1990s to overthrow the governments of Algeria and Egypt. They failed because the more people they killed, the more hated they became. And when they lost popular support, they were easily crushed.
In recent years, the dynamic has been playing itself out again. In countries like Pakistan and Jordan, where al Qaeda keeps slaughtering innocent Muslims, its public support has fallen off a cliff. During the Bush years, the only thing that kept al Qaeda from complete ideological collapse was Muslim hatred of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our unblinking support for Muslim dictatorships and for Israel, and our use of torture at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.
Now Obama, by pledging to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and close Gitmo, and by eschewing torture—in other words, by not overreacting to the terrorist threat—is cutting al Qaeda’s throat. Although the U.S. government is still not exactly loved in Muslim nations, it is hated less. Between 2008 and 2009, according to Gallup, approval of U.S. policies rose 23 points in Tunisia, 22 points in Algeria, 19 points in Egypt, 17 points in Saudi Arabia and 13 points in Kuwait. In Indonesia, according to the Pew Research Center, approval of the U.S. rose 26 points. And not coincidentally, al Qaeda’s slide seems to be accelerating. Between 2003 and 2009, according to Pew, support for Osama bin Laden has dropped 34 points in Indonesia, 28 points in Pakistan, 28 points in Jordan, 20 points in the Palestinian territories, 16 points in Lebanon and 13 points in Turkey. In Indonesia and Pakistan, much of the decline has occurred in the last year alone. Bin Laden is having so much trouble demonizing the United States that his last audio tape focused on climate change.
Al Qaeda's dimisihing support among his co-religionists stems from many different factors, of which Barack Obama's relative neglect must be counted as a minimal contributor.
[On several levels I agree with the President that Islamic terror, whether from al Qaeda and its ilk or their Shia brethren, hardly represents an existential risk to America; on the other hand, I do believe that the fall-out, figurative to a much greater extent that literal, of a successful mass casualty attack, would eventuate in massive losses of life and resources; in our current economic straits, a many month disruption of normal economic activity could well turn our present recession into a double dip or worse. On that basis, terrorism must be considered a major issue for the Executive branch. In addition, and among other reasons for concern, their political viability would evaporate in the aftermath of a successful attack. Ignoring, or minimizing, terror is a losing stance for the Obama administration.]
It is certainly true that some non-quantifiable amount of Islamist recruiting is abetted by the bad press that the US receives throughout the Middle East for our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our support for the hated Jews in Israel. On the other hand, none other than Osama bin Laden himself has suggested that Arabs will support the strong horse in any conflict. At the moment, al Qaeda is a weak horse indeed, the result of the military actions we have taken and our enlistment of various states in the neighborhood who are fighting against al Qaeda for their own reasons.
To add to the complexity, Martin Kramer posits yet another factor, demographics, to help explain Arab/Muslim terrorism:
You get six minutes at the Herzliya Conference to say something memorable (and there is a clock ticking away at your feet, facing the audience). So I made a memorable argument for the role of population growth in radicalization, a clip of which is embedded below. It's memorable—but not at all original. I first encountered the idea in the stimulating work of Gunnar Heinsohn (here is one example of many).
The over abundance of young men whose access to status and sex is severely constrained, would be problematic for any culture. Societies which have almost no upward mobility, with failed parasitic and zero-sum economies, will be societies that are ripe for violence.
Radical Islam presents such young men with a socially sanctioned pathway to express their aggressive and sexual energies in acceptable directions. For the lowest functioning, most marginal, the appeal of a suicide-murder eventuating in 72 virgins in Heaven can be a powerful motivator. For the higher functioning struggling with issues of meaning, shame, and humiliation, joining an organization that attempts to "fight back against the oppressors" can offer meaning and a semblance of power. The variety of motivators for engaging in terrorism are multiple and any attempt to suggest that our behavior is the most important aspect of a decisison to join is simply inane. The primary way in which our actions can slide the threshold for joining al Qaeda down (or up) has to do with our successes in killing al Qaeda leadership. As al Qaeda has been forced to kill fellow Muslims by their lack of success killing infidels, and as they have shown themselves to be cowards and villains, and even worse, losers, al Qaeda's appeal naturally waned and will continue to fail unless and until they can pull off another terror spectacular. Decreasing al Qaeda's appeal by attriting their ranks can at some times be best accomplished by the use of owevrwhleming force, while at other times by more carefully selected targeted assassinations.
This really should not be a Democrat or Republican "issue" (which is why I suggested not too long ago that it would be in our best interests to find a synthesis.) Unfortunately, until our political class comes to some open acknowledgment of the dangers of terror (including the downstream dangers of our all too predictable over-reaction to a successful attack) and determines an appropriate set of responses which the citizenry can support, we will continue to spend as much time over-simplifying and arguing with ourselves as we do conducting a war against our enemies. Ultimately this may be the greatest failure of the Obama adminstration's approach to the War on Islamist terror: they have squandered a full year in which they might have been able to establish a rule set regarding terror more to the liking of the liberal community even while acceptable to the vast center. Perhaps it just didn't occur to them that even "non-Right wingers" want to be kept safe.
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