Contrary to the propagandists at The New York Times and their story about a leaked National Intelligence Estimate, Melanie Phillips correctly breaks down the notion that defending ourselves against jihad causes more jihad.
[I]f wasn’t Iraq something else would have acted as a recruiting sergeant for the jihad. Indeed, something else did: Afghanistan, and before that Bosnia, and always Israel. There is always a ’something else’ –because these grievances are the outcome of the phenomenon we are up against, and not its cause. And that phenomenon is jihad, a concept that the west just cannot seem to get its head round at all. As it rolls on and on across the world, one cause follows another in a steady stream. But they represent the lava, not the volcano.The fact is, there’s a war on. Not a war of our making – a war declared against the free world by the forces of Islamic fascism, which had recruited enough volunteers to sow terror round the world for the past, ooh, 27 years to be precise, from the moment Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran and declared holy war against the non-Islamic world which no-one took seriously at the time (and many still fail to do). Now there really was one hell of a boost for Islamic terrorism. It recruited hundreds of thousands to the cause of holy war – and that was before the Saudis got going, and before al Qaeda. In other words, it didn’t take any discrete grievance or geopolitical conflict to launch the war against the free world, recruit countless jihadists and murder millions– the two-decade genocide in Sudan wasn’t caused by Iraq, for heaven’s sake. The cause, the motor, the impulse behind global Islamic terror is simply a fanatical ideology that has set itself to conquer the world of unbelievers by force for Islam.
And here’s the amazing thing. When you defend yourself against a genocidal enemy, you know what – he fights back! And fights dirtier and harder! The anti-war crowd are astounded by this. They think the fact that the enemy is fighting dirtier and harder means one thing — we should bever have started defending ourselves, and now that we have we should stop. Clausewitz must surely be rotating in his grave.
Not for the first time, the Times apparently didn't tell the whole story. "Spook 86" at In From the Cold reports (and has the quotes to back it up):
According to members of the intel community who have seen the document, the NIE is actually fair and balanced (to coin a phrase), noting both successes and failures in the War on Terror--and identifying potential points of failure for the jihadists.Posted by Alan at September 26, 2006 01:12 AM