James R. Flynn

Obama may think it safer to keep his sanity intact. But unless he presses on some hotly debated topics, we’ll be left with a world at risk.

Barack Obama will want to show that a black President can fill the office with dignity. The simplest way to do that is to chart a middle course that does not “divide America” into warring camps. This would dictate doing only the minimum needed to solve the present economic crisis and avoid alienating his liberal constituency. It is the safest way to encourage Americans to judge candidates on their merits rather than on their race. Obama has spent so much of his life in activism and advocacy to enhance the status of black Americans; who am I to second guess him if he settles for that?

And yet, he may want to take a shot at being a great President, and try to change the false images of reality that render US domestic and foreign policy so hopeless.

Black America and desperate America

When Jack Kennedy became the first Catholic President, everyone knew that the issue of state funding of church schools could not even arise. This now holds equally true for the expansion of affirmative action for blacks, that is, policies that give blacks preference over whites for government jobs, university entrance, and so forth.

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“I know of no other book so valuable in helping us grasp the nature of our enemies.”

Kind words from “Looking for Trouble” author and New York Post reviewer Ralph Peters for Cambridge author Laurent Murawiec and his new book The Mind of Jihad. Here’s the full review:

Allowing the fanatics who’ve ravaged Islam (and who’ve slaughtered countless Muslims) to speak for themselves, author Laurent Murawiec quotes the late Ayatollah Khomeini: “Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war . . . I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim . . . A religion without war is a crippled religion. It is war that purifies the earth.”

A notorious ally of Khomeini’s, Ayatollah Khalkali, put it even more bluntly: “Those who are against killing have no place in Islam.”

Those are but two of the hundreds of chilling citations in “The Mind Of Jihad” - a work that needs to be widely read in Washington, where key government organizations forbid the use of the term “Islamist terrorist” to avoid offending our enemies.

Murawiec painstakingly dissects the roots of the current Islamist jihad against our civilization. He employs the extensive Muslim literature on the subject to explode the nonsensical claim that “true jihad” is an innocent personal struggle, rather than a theology of conquest.

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Writing for Commentary, Joshua Muravchik reviewed Tim Lynch and Rob Singh’s After Bush in this month’s issue.

The End of the Beginning

After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy

GEORGE W. BUSH has been one of the most reviled of recent Presidents, and he has poll ratings to match. But with the “surge” in Iraq giving signs of having snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, a number of observers have begun to argue that he will be rated more kindly in hindsight than he has been in real time. “There’s more ferment about the Bush legacy than is sometimes acknowledged,” concluded a recent summary in the Washington Post.

Now a book-length presentation of this point has arrived from, of all sources, the groves of British academe, where Bush is hardly more popular than, say, global warming. Timothy J. Lynch and Robert S. Singh, both of whom teach at the University of London, couch their defense of Bush in the form of a meditation on what will follow after his administration. Their surprising conclusion: “None of the key elements of the Bush Doctrine . . . will be abandoned in practice by successor administrations, whatever their rhetorical recalibrations and tactical adjustments.”

Why not? Because, Lynch and Singh answer, Bush’s analysis of the challenge we face from Islamic terrorists was basically correct. Like it or not, a “second cold war,” no more of our choosing than the first one, has been thrust upon us. The authors prefer the term “second cold war” to “World War IV”—favored by Norman Podhoretz, R. James Woolsey, and others—because it emphasizes the ideological dimension that, in their judgment, was more in the forefront of our contest with Soviet Communism than it was in World Wars I and II. And much like its predecessor, they write, this second cold war is destined to last for a long time: “Defeating jihadist Islam ultimately requires nothing less than the reform of Islam to separate mosque and state, modernization of Arab and Muslim societies, and steps toward genuine self-government.”

Hence, there is discomfiting news for all those looking forward to January 2009 as the end of the Bush years. That date, observe Lynch and Singh, “marks only the end of the beginning of an epochal struggle.” What is more, they believe they can discern, through the din of reproach directed at Bush, the strains of an incipient national consensus on the matter. This emergent consensus is based on a confluence of factors: the undeniable severity of the threat; the continuance of America’s global primacy; the “appeal of a distinctly American internationalism”; bipartisan support for the war on terror even if not the Iraq war; and the “vitality of American exceptionalism,” in which “values as well as interests have been, and will remain, crucial
components of American policies.”

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Timothy Lynch

The recent endorsement of Barack Obama by Colin Powell is consequential for two reasons. First, it indicates that Obama has survived the attacks on his past associations and leftist provenance, made by authors such as Jerome Corsi, and is actually now a rather more mainstream foreign policy candidate than many had anticipated. Indeed, if he wins the election he will become the new face of the foreign policy establishment.

Powell’s endorsement also highlights just how true a President Obama is likely to be to Bush foreign policy. Powell was actually suggesting that Obama will run a Bush foreign policy – only a more competent and effective one. Obama’s radicalism withers by the day. We should expect a foreign and especially national security policy which buys into many of the central precepts of the 2001-09 years but which is capable of adaptation and tactical recalibration. Obama has never contended for a foreign policy revolution away from Bush but for a reformulation of tactics in pursuit of a strategy first articulated by a Republican White House after 9/11. The war on terror will not cease on January 20, 2009.

We get news from Iraq, when it pierces the coverage of our tanking economy, that jihadists are scrambling to assert their cause against a population that is turning away from them. Surprising, but not actually. In a country torn by years of violence, people swept up in the initial rhetoric get sick of it all.

National security blogger Bruce Schneier, writing for WIRED, has identified what he calls the “Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists,” based on a pre-doctoral fellow at Stanford’s latest research.

Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is inherently political, and that people become terrorists for political reasons. This is the “strategic” model of terrorism, and it’s basically an economic model. It posits that people resort to terrorism when they believe — rightly or wrongly — that terrorism is worth it; that is, when they believe the political gains of terrorism minus the political costs are greater than if they engaged in some other, more peaceful form of protest.

. . .

Terrorists, he writes, (1) attack civilians, a policy that has a lousy track record of convincing those civilians to give the terrorists what they want; (2) treat terrorism as a first resort, not a last resort, failing to embrace nonviolent alternatives like elections; (3) don’t compromise with their target country, even when those compromises are in their best interest politically; (4) have protean political platforms, which regularly, and sometimes radically, change; (5) often engage in anonymous attacks, which precludes the target countries making political concessions to them; (6) regularly attack other terrorist groups with the same political platform; and (7) resist disbanding, even when they consistently fail to achieve their political objectives or when their stated political objectives have been achieved.

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.

That’s a fair assessment. Ever see a violent inner-city gang “accomplish” anything? People joining gangs don’t do it for such ends. Understanding terrorism as having political ends, Schneier writes, may mis-read the motivations of jihadists.

The Mind of Jihad will be out in the next few days, and it may fill in some more of the gaps in our understanding. It gives a history and anthropology to terrorists and their methods, effective and otherwise.