Daniel Pipes, writing in The New York Post, reflects on the Bush administration’s strategy for fighting terrorism:
How well is the Bush administration conducting the war on terrorism?
Overall, it deserves high grades, having shown an impressive seriousness of purpose, discipline, and vision. It made winning the war the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy and almost flawlessly pulled off the military campaign in Afghanistan.
It carefully picked out the next steps (soldiers to the Philippines, pressure on Pakistan and the Palestinian Authority, warning signals to Yemen and Somalia). It correctly made counterterrorism a high priority in American domestic life.
There is just one glaringly weak spot: The Bush team adamantly refuses to acknowledge that there is an ideology that inspires America’s enemies, preferring to ascribe its motives to simple ‘evil.’
Evil it is, but it follows from the specific set of radical utopian ideas known as militant Islam.
Along with Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Krauthammer, and Bernard Lewis, Pipes has been as unblinkingly candid about militant Islam as anyone (perhaps even moreso). Tellingly, before the 9/11 attacks, Pipes was written off as a “racist” hack by many in the Middle East Scholarship establishment — though he was one of only a handful of scholars who (as it turns out) was sounding the relevant alarm bells.
Interestingly, many of those same critics still view Pipes as a hack and a racist today, proving that their ideology is stronger than their memories are long. Pipes concludes:
The time has come for the Bush administration to find the courage to acknowledge that the enemy is not made up of random and featureless ‘terrorists’ but is specifically staffed by the cadres of militant Islam.
The sooner it does so, the more efficiently the country will be able to protect itself by clamping down on the forces of militant Islam. The more the government delays, the more likely that attacks will continue.
[update: more from the scholars: Harvard’s Huntington and Roshomon, and Rand’s Hoffman — via David Brooks for The Weekly Standard.]
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