Bolshevik revolution offers analogies for 21st-century Islamic jihad
Copyright © 2005 The Quad-City Times | www.QCTimes.com
Gen. John Abizaid probably commands the most potent military force in history. The troops of his Central Command are arrayed across the jagged crescent of the Middle East, from Egypt to Pakistan, in an overwhelming projection of U.S. power. He travels with his own mini-government: a top State Department officer to manage diplomacy; a senior CIA officer to oversee intelligence; a retinue of generals and admirals to supervise operations and logistics. If there is a modern Imperium Americanum, Abizaid is its field general.
I traveled recently with Abizaid as he visited Iraq and heard him discuss his strategy for what he calls the “Long War“ to contain Islamic extremism in Centcom’s turbulent theater of operations. We talked about the current front in Iraq, and the longer-term process of change in the Middle East, which Abizaid views as the ultimate strategic challenge.
It was a week that focused attention on gut-level issues, reminiscent of the Vietnam War more than 30 years ago: Why are we in Iraq? What kind of conflict is the United States fighting there? How can we win it? Abizaid offers the best answers to these questions I’ve heard from any official in the U.S. government. In addition to being the military’s top commander in the Middle East, he has an intellectual and emotional feel for the region.
He’s of Arab ancestry — his forebears came to the United States from Lebanon in the 1870s.
America’s enemies in this Long War, he argues, are what he calls “Salafist jihadists.“ That’s his term for the Muslim fundamentalists who use violent tactics to try to re-create what they imagine was the pure and perfect Islamic government of the era of the prophet Muhammad, who is sometimes called the “Salaf.” Osama bin Laden is the best known of the Salafist extremists, but Abizaid argues that the movement is much broader and more diffuse than al-Qaida. It’s a loose network of like-minded individuals who use 21st-century technology to spread their vision of a 7th-century paradise.
Salafist preachers see themselves as part of a vanguard whose mission is to radicalize other Muslims to overthrow their leaders. Abizaid likens them to Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders. He urges us to think of today’s Islamic world, wracked by waves of violence, as akin to Europe in the revolutionary year of 1848. The Arab world’s spasms of anarchy and terror, like those in Europe 150 years ago, are part of a process of social change — in which an old order is crumbling, and a new one is struggling to be born.
Abizaid’s historical analogies are helpful because they stretch our thinking. The wealthy Saudi jihadist bin Laden begins to seem a bit like 19th-century anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, who similarly wanted to use revolutionary violence to purge what he viewed as a corrupt order. On this broad canvas of historical change, the time horizon isn’t years, but decades.
If the United States is fighting an ideological vanguard similar to the Bolsheviks — whose leaders will never surrender or negotiate — then it will have to capture or kill them. That suggests a dirty, drawn-out conflict in which each side tests the other’s will and staying power. It’s not the sort of war that democracies are usually good at fighting, but among Abizaid’s team of advisers, you hear the same phrase over and over: “A lot of bad guys are going to have to die.”
Yet because the battlefield is society itself, the United States cannot think of the struggle in purely military terms. Centcom’s 1,000 troops who are digging wells and performing other reconstruction tasks in the Horn of Africa may be a better model for success than the 150,000 soldiers hunkered down in Iraq. And because it is a war of transformation, comparable to Europe’s hundred-year process of modernization in the 19th century, the United States must above all be patient.
Abizaid is frustrated that Arab journalists haven’t provided a more critical picture of life in places where Islamic insurgents have gained control, such as Fallujah. He’s convinced that if ordinary Arabs could see the cruelty and repression of these Taliban-style jihadists, they would reject them. “They are the most despicable enemy I’ve ever seen,” he told European and Arab leaders who gathered in Bahrain to talk about Persian Gulf security. “They operate from mosques, they behead people, they have killed far more Muslims than non-Muslims.“
Abizaid believes the winning strategy, in Iraq and across the Islamic world, is to isolate the Salafist vanguard from ordinary Muslims who want the better, freer life that prosperity and connectedness can bring. That means breaching the gaps between rich nations and poor ones, and preventing terrorists from establishing bases of operations, in the way bin Laden did in Afghanistan. “The clear military lesson of Afghanistan is that we cannot allow the enemy to establish a safe haven anywhere,” he says.
My travels with Abizaid ended with a stop in Mosul, at the same camp hit by a suicide bomber on Dec. 21. Mosul is a case study in what America is facing in Iraq, and in the Long War. Over the past year, the city has gone from a model of stability to a new Fallujah, where insurgents have used terror tactics to halt collaboration with U.S. forces. The measure of success here will be the return of normal life. “It won’t ever be over completely, where you wake up one morning and the enemy has surrendered,” says Abizaid. “But one day you’ll wake up and there will be more food, more security, more stability.“
That’s what victory would look like in Abizaid’s Long War, too. In the broad arc of the world where Centcom operates, life would feel modern, connected, free, relaxed, ordinary. It would feel like a hand that is no longer clenched in a fist. It’s a fight where the Muslims masses would win, without the United States losing.
Contact David Ignatius at davidignatius@washpost.com.
Copyright © 2002 The Quad-City Times |
