Islam ineptitude at White House
It’s not just CIA Director Mike Hayden who says al-Qaida is on the ropes.
The jihad’s leading theorist writes from his prison cell in Egypt that Osama bin Laden betrayed Islam with his 9/11 attack.
Coming from an Egyptian terrorist titan known by his nom de guerre, Dr. Fadl, that frontal attack last year stirred up a hornet’s nest of other al-Qaida dissent. It forced al-Qaida’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, to issue an unprecedented and blatantly self-serving public manifesto defending his terror methods that kill so many Muslims.
Has the Age of Aquarius in the terrorism wars finally arrived?
No such luck.
The White House continues to fumble important chances to transform its foreign policy to embrace such changes within Islam.
Instead, U.S. officials seem to denigrate all Muslims by using terms such as “Islamofascism” to refer to America’s enemies.
Al-Qaida’s weakness would be something to celebrate if it weren’t creating greater potential dangers to the U.S. homeland. The network’s embarrassed leaders may be looking for that next big strike against the infidels to restore their lost standing with other Muslims.
Yet by not capitalizing on the rising tide of popular Islamic disgust to embrace less confrontational approaches, U.S. officials aren’t just missing opportunities to make inroads with average Muslims.
They’re also managing to look weak and out of touch – which automatically lowers their standing in the Arab world.
On Friday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted she didn’t know that diplomats working for her had been unable to get Israel to let eight Palestinian Fulbright scholars leave the Gaza Strip to accept the peace-promoting U.S. fellowships.
The administration’s inability to effect real Middle East change left it to Arab leaders to broker the region’s most important recent deal, resolving a months-long political impasse in Lebanon.
Likewise, the bombshell that Syria and Israel had resumed peace talks was due to Turkey’s mediation – not America’s.
In another spectacular misfire, U.S. officials now largely acknowledge that the terrorism brig at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba that the White House came up with as a way to avoid any inconvenient international laws of warfare, habeas corpus or torture has become a policy detriment that screams abuses to the rest of the world.
Yet in one more seemingly embarrassing admission last week, Rice confessed that President Bush wants to close the prison but can’t figure out what to do with the inmates it holds.
Except that’s only half true.
Poisonous electoral politics are driving U.S. policy in the opposite direction – right over the cliff – as Pentagon officials press to try some of the 9/11 defendants at Gitmo immediately. It’s an obvious attempt to get at least some of them sentenced to death before the November election.
And while U.S. officials deny that motivation, the former Gitmo prosecutor who testified this was their agenda got slapped with military sanctions within weeks of his testimony.
What should America be doing? Military strategists at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania have a lot of good ideas that the White House, unsurprisingly, continues to ignore.
In an April paper, the war college’s Sherifa Zuhur wrote, “It is time to abandon the assumptions of a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, which are funding a well-meant but arrogant and misconceived program for rehabilitation of the Islamic world based on the idea that the West knows best.”
It is an appealing part of the U.S. character that we want so much to help others. But it’s about time our policy-makers recognized that the high-handed idea that only America knows the best way to transform the Islamic world into a place of modern progressivism is itself hampering change.